This week has been about cloud management from first principles - with both my engineering and my portfolio hat’s on.

  • Reviewing SLAs, OLAs and standards as part of Project-R - great and valid questions coming out of this process. Identifying and filling in gaps and inconsistencies where I find them. Lots of discussions and a little way off from implementing the changes but being customer-driven is exactly how you enhance your services for the better so this has been a great exercise. SLAs in particular can get very complicated, very quickly especially when it comes to compound SLAs and overlapping SLAs. I’ve added this to my blog queue because there is definitely more to write on this topic.

  • Working with out internal developer platform team to review the re-design of our customer off-boarding workflow. There are several scenarios we see here: leaving us for another partner, leaving us and taking it back in-house, leaving and decommissioning, staying but partial decommission. This is one of those topics that can sometimes be difficult to talk about internally because on one likes to talk about customers leaving but it is a reality and I feel that the more positive and seamless you make the experience the more likely they are to feel comfortable coming back again in the future. Designing these workflows with the team so we can design to make this as easy as possible in our platform.

  • Project-N continues this week with me spending all of Thursday and Friday reviewing all our AWS customers from first principles - what they have, what they are contracted against, what gaps there are and opportunities for us to do more. Lots of areas coming out for us to improve our services and how pro-active we are, nothing scary but lots of work and some exciting things we can now automate away in the coming months.

  • This week’s background noise is Slow Horses - S02, heck not just background noise, this is one of my favourite new shows.