Episode 36: I'm Not Here to Correct Your English, Just Cloud Bills

Do you enjoy watching sports? Wear your favorite team or player’s jersey? Are you a fan who has shopped at Fanatics on the Cloud?

Today, we’re talking to Johnny Sheeley, director of Cloud engineering at Fanatics, which is a sports eCommerce business that manufactures and sells sports apparel. Fanatics runs Cloud engineering to provide a robust and reliable set of services by building and deploying applications on top of the Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) platform.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• If you compete with Amazon, be ready for it to come after you; some companies avoid its Cloud perspective or go multi-Cloud (paranoia-based movement)
• Focus on your ability to make your business function smoothly
• Transition, migration, and abstraction may be painful, but should not stop work; paying for Cloud-agnostic technology may not be worth it
• Challenges of governing use of Cloud resources to prevent mistakes/problems related to Fanatics’ security and budget
• Data collected focuses on what’s trending up or down to select an instance type that calculates costs; remain flexible and be aware of what you pay
• Natural instinct is to blame people; mistakes are made, especially when a human factor is introduced to an automated system
• Creating a mindset that focuses on feature and detail-oriented is challenging
• Cottage industry of code bases running in Big Data and other expensive realms
• As a product continues to evolve and grow, governance comes along for the ride and AWS bills are streamlined
• Will serverless, Lambda, and RDS change how Amazon charges in the future?
• State of scale of AWS and developing a more palatable method for releases because people can’t keep up with them and stop paying attention
• Two-Pizza Team: Amazon’s management philosophy that any team that works on a service should be able to be fed with two pizzas
• Such small teams work quickly and have the freedom to fail, but Amazon has a reliability for the longevity of its different services

Links:

• Johnny Sheeley's Email
• Johnny Sheeley on Twitter
• Rands Leadership Slack
• Hangops.slack.com
• Fanatics
• Kubernetes
• Azure
• Lambda
• RDS
• Getafix: How Facebook Tools Learn to Fix Bugs Automatically
• Accidentally Quadratic Blog
• re:Invent
• Jeff Barr’s AWS News Blog
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Lots of Amazon's projects have failed...and that's ok, says Amazon's Andy Jassy
• Digital Ocean