A few months back I had dinner with a group of product managers returning from Scrum training. The team had been struggling to find the right process for their organization, and hoped the additional training might identify their internal deficiencies. One of the product managers confided to me in his disappointment that the instructor’s general answer was that they were not being “Scrum enough” – and that their success required adhering to all the principles of Scrum, not just picking and choosing the ones they wanted to adopt.
When I started my career in software, I had the opportunity to work with a small team of talented engineers at a company called Easel, which I captured in 8 Lessons From the First Scrum Team. In those days, we didn’t have the...
In the mid-1990s I was in a startup that licensed the best selling job hunting book, What Color Is Your Parachute?. Our target market was job hunters, and our software was designed to help people find their next job. I remember reading through the book looking for advice from the author, Dick Bolles, who was one of the most recognized job hunting experts in the U.S. To my surprise, his advice – delivered through his book and eventually our on-site video shoot at his California home – could be distilled to this: the best way to find a job is to know someone who has one.
I remember thinking at the time: that’s it?!
But as the years went on, I began to appreciate the simplicity of the advice, since it cut to the heart of two job hunting truths: 1) most...
By Joe Kinsella & Josh Pasqualetto
Introduction
While the cloud offers numerous means of storing data, the Swiss army knife of cloud storage remains the block store. Up until recently, Amazon was the only provider of block storage, recognizing early the importance of attaching variable sized storage to compute as a means of supporting a wide variety of customer use cases. But as cloud providers move to add block storage to their offerings, not all are acknowledging the most important feature of the Amazon block store: striping.
Background
A block store is a service that allows users to attach storage volumes to virtual instances. For example, Amazon EBS allows one or more volumes of up to 1 TB to be attached to EC2 instances and used as virtual disks. Block...
Introduction
With several vendors offering cloud compute, it is becoming increasingly complex to identify which cloud instance type is most cost effective for your needs. To help find the right cloud for your workloads, we have compiled a comparison of 34 instance types available from 4 cloud providers. The comparison provides pricing, which includes reserved pricing if available, and three key metrics to assess the cost effectiveness of this instance type for different workloads:
Price per virtual core per month – used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of the processing power of the instance type
Price per GB disk per month - used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of disk for the instance type
Price per GB memory per month - used to evaluate the cost...
By now you have seen the Amazon S3 price reduction. Effective Monday, Amazon has discounted the price per gigabyte for their cloud object store by up to 13%, with the discount inversely proportional to the storage consumed. The official explanation for the discount is that Amazon continues to innovate to drive down costs and “pass along the resultant savings to you.” If you’re a competitor, you’re likely to take away a different conclusion: Amazon’s disruptive pricing isn’t going to stop any time soon.
The Amazon announcement reveals a little known fact in the 2012 battle for the public cloud: competitors that have maintained tight control over the cost effectiveness of their software, infrastructure and operations have an unfair...
