A look back on how we moved our publishing environment to the

cloud

The Wheelers boarded a boat, crossed the English Channel, and began driving eastward. As the young couple began their trek, they observed a daily budget of $6, crossing Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and into Iran. Once they arrived in Afghanistan, the next country in a dizzying itinerary, the Wheelers sold the Austin and resorted to any transportation mode made available to them. The couple traveled by bus, train, boat, and rickshaw, hitchhiking whenever the need arose. Impulse served as their guidebook, taking the Wheelers on a meandering course snaking through Pakistan, Kashmir, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia finally arriving in Exmouth in Western Australia – via a lift on a yacht out of Bali •1972 - Across Asia on the Cheap. •1500 hundred copies printed and sold – funded their next trip

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Across Asia on the cheap written on their kitchen table, they printed 1500 copies which sold out in a couple of weeks. Currently available in the kindle store for the bargain sum of $0.00. This provided funding for their next journey and another book.

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Disruption is on the way courtesy of the reality distortion effect.

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Two Data Centres

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"If I had a $100m, I wouldn't spend it on a data center; I'd want to spend it on another House of Cards." @adrianco (Netflix Chief Architect) Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Infrastructure is now simply the cost of doing business. Software is eating the world as wrote Mark Thiessen – publishing and now Infrastructure. SPP running on top of IAAS – enabled innovation – agile ops. Cycle time – lean concept – time from an idea to production – continous delivery and devops.

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Core principles Agile Infra as Code Automation Finally we can build an agile data centre free of the constraints of physical construction we consume on demand delivering instant value iteratively.

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No BUFD, it doesn’t work!!!!! Low risk tech try before you buy. Started with a parallel run off build agents. Soaked it in and cutover. Ran dev in parallel, soaked it in and cutover Ran prod in parellel, soaked it, testted cutover 10 times then cutover. Most stress free cutover I have ever been involved in.

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Now the fun part, compute now only limited by budget means it can be used to drive efficiencies in a cost effective manner using it’s elasticity (ramp up build agents during the day means developers can test builds quicker).

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Infra as code no manual intervention gives repeatable dependable environments. Taking time to build a first high quality environment meant this could be replicated across the others speeding up the process.

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Moved our compute around the world where it suited us (near staff/customers). Leverage AWS economies of scale to build our own DC’s would have cost a huge amount of money and time managing them.

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Developers now manage their own Infrastructure.

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Warning – It is not as simple as some of the marketing would lead you to believe. Architecture is essential to enable performance and scaling so forklifting applications does not work. Just like you don’t outsource a mess you can’t move a mess to the cloud and expect it to perform. Like for like cheaper but note Jevon’s Paradox* – “As you become more efficient at something you consume more of it”. *Courtesy of @swardley - http://blog.gardeviance.org/

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Cycle time, lead time, value-creating time defined. From the excellent "learning to see“@jezhumble http://www.amazon.com/dp/0966784308?tag=contindelive-20

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