Last month I joined the Cloud 66 family. I was fortunate enough to spend my first week at our company retreat, offering me the unique opportunity to not only get better acquainted with my colleagues, but also be part of the conversation around strategic direction and the focus areas for the year ahead. It was an enlightening experience, full of great ideas, inspired conversation and genuine excitement around sharing the benefits of Cloud 66 with the development community. But how does one get to be part of a bona fide, home-grown tech startup?
As Marketers, we’re hard-wired to immediately begin with asking ‘what’s the story here’ to determine if there’s enough potential to warrant taking such a leap of faith. It involves casting a critical eye on the product to assess whether it resolves problems of substance. And secondly, it’s really an exercise in courting to discover whether the fit is right. I’ve found that the more seasoned you become, the more discernment starts creeping into your career choices. It becomes less about being financially driven or chasing job titles, and more about the cultural spirit, collective consciousness and whether those you encounter share the same values. Stepping into the role of being responsible for promoting the awesomeness of our products was an easy decision to make. And I’ll tell you why.
I think it was during one of my very first interviews when our CEO Khash described what we did as ‘a cross between the convenience of a PaaS such as Heroku, with the flexibility of using your own servers’. PaaS providers have championed the cause of launching web applications easily, without the added complexity of configuring and managing the underpinning infrastructure. But it’s all come at a price. The inherent inflexibility of deployment options has prevented the mix and match of microservices, failing the needs of modern-day architectural workflows. As a standalone solution, public PaaS can make it difficult to onboard new technologies. The cost commitment of not being able to deviate from what’s on offer overshadows the false security of having an all-in-one management platform that supposedly does everything for you.
To reduce the cycle time from development to production, DevOps are often turned to for specialist knowledge on how to ease the transition of code through lean workflows. As a cloud-based service, Cloud 66 simplifies this workflow by building, deploying and maintaining applications on any server, via your cloud provider of choice. Offering a Docker container management service for polyglotic applications alongside Rails-specific application support, Cloud 66 takes the best of what PaaS has to offer, teaming it with the flexibility, ease of use and choice of using familiar tools, while easing you in to the adoption of new ones.
Developers want to deliver better software, faster. Linux containers like Docker are a new and promising technology that helps reduce operational cost, increasing developer efficiency and productivity. While building containers in a dev environment is relatively straightforward, a few months ago, Khash wrote a blogpost outlining some of the hurdles of getting containers into production. Utilizing a container management service clears the way for developers to focus on what’s important; building the code, defining the infrastructure, and deploying new versions without additional scripting. Everything from packaging of code into a container image, to private container image hosting, deployment, and service discovery are all handled by Cloud 66.
It’s an exciting time for the London tech scene, and as a home-grown startup, I’m genuinely thrilled to be part of this talented group of technophiles. We’re passionate in our belief in the product, which addresses so many of the pain points experienced within the developer community. They say careers are often built on good timing, and being presented with the right kind of opportunities. If my belief in the product and the team behind it wasn’t enough to convince me to join, well there was always this to get me over the finish line:
