The cloud can’t solve all your problems

Jon ShanksContributorJon Shanks is CEO and co-founder of cloud-native delivery platform Appvia.

The way a team functions and communicates dictates the operational efficiency of a startup and sets the scene for its culture. It's way more important than what social events and perks are offered, so it's the responsibility of a founder and/or CEO to provide their team with a technology approach that will empower them to achieve and succeed - now and in the future.

With that in mind, moving to the cloud might seem like a no-brainer because of its huge benefits around flexibility, accessibility and the potential to rapidly scale, while keeping budgets in check.

But there's an important consideration here: Cloud providers won't magically give you efficient teams.

Designing a startup for scale means investing in the right technology today to underpin growth for tomorrow and beyond.

It will get you going in the right direction, but you need to think even farther ahead. Designing a startup for scale means investing in the right technology today to underpin growth for tomorrow and beyond. Let's look at how you approach and manage your cloud infrastructure will impact the effectiveness of your teams and your ability to scale.

Hindsight is 20/20

Adopting cloud is easy, but adopting it properly with best practices and in a secure way? Not so much. You might think that when you move to cloud, the cloud providers will give you everything you need to succeed. But even though they're there to provide a wide breadth of services, these services won't necessarily have the depth that you will need to run efficiently and effectively.

Yes, your cloud infrastructure is working now, but think beyond the first prototype or alpha and toward production. Considering where you want to get to, and not just where you are, will help you avoid costly mistakes. You definitely don't want to struggle through redefining processes and ways of working when you're also managing time sensitivities and multiple teams.

If you don't think ahead, you'll have to put all new processes in. It will take a whole lot longer, cost more money and cause a lot more disruption to teams than if you do it earlier.

For any founder, making strategic technology decisions right now should be a primary concern. It feels more natural to put off those decisions until you come face to face with the problem, but you'll just end up needing to redo everything as you scale and cause your teams a world of hurt. If you don't give this problem attention at the beginning, you're just scaling the problems with the team. Flaws are then embedded within your infrastructure, and they'll continue to scale with the teams. When these things are rushed, corners are cut and you will end up spending even more time and money on your infrastructure.

Build effective teams and reduce bottlenecks

When you're making strategic decisions on how to approach your technology stack and cloud infrastructure, the biggest consideration should be what makes an effective team. Given that, keep these things top of mind:

• Speed of delivery: Having developers able to self-serve cloud infrastructure with best practices built-in will enable speed. Development tools that factor in visibility and communication integrations for teams will give transparency on how they are iterating, problems, bugs or integration failures.
• Speed of testing: This is all about ensuring fast feedback loops as your team works on critical new iterations and features. Developers should be able to test as much as possible locally and through continuous integration systems before they are ready for code review.
• Troubleshooting problems: Good logging, monitoring and observability services, gives teams awareness of issues and the ability to resolve problems quickly or reproduce customer complaints in order to develop fixes.