Modern Digital Business Blog

Make Sure You Understand How Cloud Costs Differ from Other Business Costs

Do you know what “color” your cloud money is? An odd question, perhaps, but an important one. Because the emergence of the cloud hasn’t only changed how we leverage software applications, it has also changed the type of money it takes businesses to operate those applications. To better understand this, a brief overview of corporate finances is needed. There are three distinct types of money that most companies use for various business expenditures: 1. Capital expenditure A ca

Do You Need a Cloud Center of Excellence? [podcast]

In the past few years, cloud computing has become a dominant trend in enterprise IT. The benefits of moving to the cloud are clear: lower costs, flexibility, and scalability. But as more companies move their infrastructure into public clouds such as AWS or Azure, they face a challenge that is often overlooked. How do I transform an organization from a typical on-premises company to a cloud-native, cloud-centric organization? A Cloud Center of Excellence, or a CCoE for short, is an organizational

ModernOps with Beth Long: Transferring Operational Expertise to the Cloud

Today on Modern Digital Business, we continue with another episode of our highly successful “ModernOps” series. ModernOps is a series of interviews co-hosted with my good friend and former colleague Beth Long, head of product at Jeli.io, an incident analysis company. This is our second podcast interview in a series of episodes. In the first episode, we talked about how the experience using the cloud varies from large companies to small companies. In this new episode, we talk ab

Talking DevOps with Mitch Ashley, CTO of Techstrong Group (DevOps.com)

DevOps has now gone mainstream. If you and your organization aren’t using DevOps principles, you are at a distinct disadvantage compared to your competition. And, “doing DevOps” does not mean simply “hiring a DevOps team”—there’s much more to it than that. My guest for the latest episode of the Modern Digital Business podcast is Mitch Ashley, CTO of Techstrong Group. Techstrong is the publishers of DevOps.com and other publications. In this episode, Mitc

How Large Companies Use AWS vs. Smaller Companies [podcast]

The next episode of the Modern Digital Business podcast has just dropped. What’s it about? It’s the first episode of a new series that we are calling ModernOps. My guest host with this new series is Beth Long, a good friend of mine and infrastructure operations expert. Beth has served as Head of Product at Jeli.io, an incident analysis company, and Senior Software Engineer and DevOps Strategist at New Relic. This week is our first episode of the ModernOps series.

How to Become a Software Architect: Interview with Java Brains Founder

I was recently interviewed by Koushik Kothagal, founder of the popular Java Brains developer training portal, for his podcast show The Artifact. Koushik and I had a lively discussion about what it really takes to become a software architect—and specifically how software engineers who are ready for the next step in their careers can make the leap from developer to architect. Our conversation was inspired by my popular LinkedIn learning course Software Architecture: From Developer to Archite

2022 Is the Year of the Citizen Developer

This past year has seen a rise in a new class of software developer, known collectively as the citizen developer. The term citizen developer is used to describe when non-programmers build applications that solve specific business needs. Citizen developers could be product managers, marketing managers, business executives, and others in an enterprise that are not in a traditional software development role. The role of the citizen developer has been growing for many years, with 2021 seeing an expo

Why Is Single Ownership So Important to a STOSA Organization?

STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and sophistication, a larger development organization is required to build and ma

What Is a STOSA Organization?

STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and grows in sophistication, a larger development organization must build and man