My Four Steps for a successful cloud deployment - Introduction

Cupcake vending - Automation Utopia

My idea of utopia is the choice to do what you want, when you want. By leveraging automation, I believe everything can be provided for in abundance. Food farmed or created. Housing everywhere. Work? Not really heard of. After all, if everyone has food and accommodation provided, most of your income is no longer needed.

Let’s have fun, pursue true happiness and fulfilment. Play games, read books, study history or philosophy. Maybe the robots can take over the world, and we can live in a zoo, where the robots feed us and allow us to do whatever we want and go wherever we want. There are many dystopian views too, and as a positive person, I choose to focus on the utopian. If you want a taste of what this might look like, then I encourage you to put the Culture series of books by Iain M Banks on your reading list.

I have four steps to help us deliver this value. Design, automation, scaling and data.

Design is sometimes called a minimum viable product, and isn’t the long and time-consuming step that it once was. Agile says we need to do just enough design to start delivering value.

Automation is where we build what we have designed, and perhaps revisit the design and build to improve the automation in an iterative way.

Scaling is where the biggest excitement and the biggest headaches of a product or start-up lay. Having a small perfectly formed pizza is good to start with, but not quite going to cut it if you want to feed an army of conference delegates in one sitting.

Data and keeping it safe is crucial. It’s the most valuable thing we have as individuals other than our time. Ensuring it doesn’t get lost or stolen, either through hardware failure or theft, must be taken seriously.

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