We're excited to be joined by Joshua Fox (Senior Cloud Architect at DoiT International) on Tuesday 18th November at 6pm at Launchpad for Outside Advisors: A counter-intuitive approach to Customer Reliability Engineering. He will be discussing a trust-based consulting model for cloud architecture that keeps system responsibility in-house while providing on-demand access to specialised knowledge, illustrated with a Kubernetes incident response case study.

Come along to learn more about this approach, catch up with fellow developers and tech enthusiasts, and share drinks and pizza!

Look forward to seeing you there!

Outside Advisors: A counter-intuitive approach to Customer Reliability Engineering

Your in-house team can manage your cloud deployment, but even the most skilled don't have expertise in the hundreds of cloud services. You can outsource your Dev Ops, but that's expensive and worse, leaves the professional ownership in their hands; your team will never deeply understand your system.

I will present a new approach: An architect supports the organisation as an outside advisor.

We divide the responsibility like this: The in-house team is fully in charge of the system, while the consultants are committed to giving advice and help. We impose an absolute ban on advisers configuring systems, getting any write permissions, or even delivering code. The responsibility stays with the system owners, letting them build knowledge for the long term. It builds trust in the business relationship by never charging for hours, keeping the relationship focused only on finding the solution. It also improves security by keeping write permissions in-house.

To illustrate, I will walk through a case study. First, the advising organisation reviews an upcoming Kubernetes-based architecture. Next, key Kubernetes deployments go down. The customer SRE team gets on the case and manages the incident, drawing in the close help of the outside advisors, leveraging on their knowledge to close the incident rapidly.

Joshua Fox, Senior Cloud Architect at DoiT International

Joshua Fox advises tech startups and growth companies about the cloud. Along with that, he writes open source, publishes technical articles, and speaks to cloud engineers as a Google Developer Expert. Before that, he was a software architect in innovative technology companies for 20 years. He has a PhD from Harvard University and a BA in Math from Brandeis.