Building the Lightning Launcher Part Two
Recap
In our first article in this series, we covered the core vision that helped propel our team to build Odeka’s automated deployment service. In this article, we will dig into the addressable market for this service, the team that developed the solution, and the core advantages that we provide clients with this automation solution.
The Business Case for Automation
The core reason that we chose to develop this solution is because as a startup we face serious constraints on our costs and the time available to spend developing products and solutions. In addition, we need the services we provide to be cost-effective for our clients because they are smaller businesses that live in the real world and operate with very tight budgets. Whatever extra money they have for a service like this, we want them to pay that to us, not some 3rd party for no good reason.
As a growing startup, we have to consider the best ways to manage our active customers. For a small user base manual deployments are okay and create minimal overhead but to support a growing user base a startup there is a need to automate deployment and support before getting crushed. The same talent that is needed to handle everything manually is also needed to build a better system and then handle that.
To pull off this project we put together a small specialized team, to quickly iterate and test methods for delivering this type of automation. Our team consisted of:
Project Manager - responsible for scope control and cadence. The maximum amount of decision-making is pushed to the working team like system selection, budget constraints, task assignment, research, and testing approaches.
Application Architect - responsible for systems application from the ground up and in the particulars. Defines and develops applications for and of software. Capable of interfacing directly with users to synthesize requirements. You’re probably thinking that this would be easy to accomplish if you had one of these who could do it for your company and you’d be right.
Infosec Engineer - Systems administrator with the ability to interpret situational technology risk into executable policy and capable of the wrench work to implement it. Assess, provision, configure and provide design guidance on systems components to deploy prototypes into the existing systems for team members to productionalize.
One of the primary concerns that Odeka's deployment service tackles is the issue of cloud host pricing unreliability. The complexities of existing pricing structures often leave businesses in a state of uncertainty, as costs fluctuate unexpectedly. Current clouding hosting services such as Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS, and Google Cloud have impossible-to-understand pricing structures. Unfortunately, the best way to tell what something will cost is to deploy and read the invoice at the end of the month. On top of that, prices change all the time, sometimes drastically. Our solution allows you to quickly migrate between hosts or take advantage of price arbitrage, reducing your dependence on a single provider and empowering you to make informed decisions.
All commerce is some version of ecommerce these days because of this some part of every business runs on cloud technology. So choosing a cloud host to use as a business requires a huge amount of trust. Not just to run the day-to-day, but to plan against for the future. We at Odeka aren’t comfortable with that level of trust. So being able to quickly pack up shop and move to another host, or to take advantage of price arbitrage between hosts at our convenience, enables us to utilize the services without trusting our whole future to one giant tech company.
Our second consideration was to provide host flexibility as a service. Based on how important our virtual infrastructure is to us at Odeka, it’s not a huge leap to understand that most businesses might want to be in a position to take their business elsewhere if a host cranks up the costs on them. Since we can do it for ourselves, we can do it for our clients also.
The third major consideration is that complex servers need reliable DevOps. Contemporary development practices heavily utilize virtual infrastructure and automation to operate efficiently. Instead of developers requesting infrastructure provision from IT resources taking hours or days, the development environment itself should provision infrastructure for testing, demos, and production releases. This includes temporarily provisioned servers which can reduce compute time costs to a few minutes instead of paying for a server to just sit there waiting for a dev to need it. Our solution enables the development environment to self-provision infrastructure for testing, demos, and production releases, ultimately improving software development quality and accelerating time-to-market.
All developers want and need these types of environments to do top-quality work. It is often a primary reason that a software developer will choose a specific employer. We built it because we needed it. But because we built it, we can now provide it to developers and clients that work with Odeka.
We are looking for more business and industry leaders who are looking to harness the power of automation to streamline their software deployment processes. We know building a business is hard work, create space to focus on what driving your success and let Odeka deliver the type of solution that will support your business and empower your workforce. Contact us to learn how we can work with you to push your business into the future.
