Jean-Marie Ferdegue's slides from his 10-minute talk at Microservices Manchester on 'The Hidden Cost of Technology.' Jean-Marie Ferdegue is the Co-Founder of Keep It Running. www.keepitrunning.io

1. The Hidden Cost of
Technology
Jean-Marie Ferdègue, Keep It Running co-founder

2. New tech is great
• New technology is great
• Tools solve new problems; Kafka, Docker
• And change the way we work; continuous
deployments, remote working, cross functional
teams
• To deliver more value; rapid iteration, global
businesses

3. BUT

4. MicroServices
• Tech Independence…
• Fragmentation of tech. Runtimes are abstracted by
containers but middleware such as RabbitMQ,
Kafka, Spark are not
• For every new tech that appears, there’s an
outdated tech that teams wouldn’t use anymore,
but still exist in production
• Polyglot persistence. Postgres, Cassandra, Neo4J.

5. The search of
the Unicorn
Ops
• Polyglot
• 24/7
• Happy to maintain &
improve rather than
greenfield innovation
• cost effective
• stable in his career

6. Pace of change
• Business expects more from technology than
before
• … but has understood the need to invest
• As a consequence technical efforts are growing
• … creating a potential cost on the culture

7. New roles of technology
• CIO is now business leader,
not tech-only
• Responsibilities; drive
innovation and keep lights one
• Business prioritises innovation
and sees lights-on as a given
• Both objectives compete on
the same resources…
• … making the ability to keep
the lights on a competitive
advantage

8. Open Source
• Subject to the same feature-first and crowd
pleasing biases than other products
• … potentially at the expense of scalability,
monitoring, backup

9. What does the future hold?
• As more companies embrace micro services
principles…
• … the way they run their ops will separate them
from competitors
• … or maybe not run Ops themselves

10. The 4 hidden costs of new
technology
• People
• Culture
• Innovate AND Keep It Running
• OpenSource support model