The cloud means different things to different people. To us, it means two things:
Being Fearless
In my previous life, I worked with large corporations with dedicated IT teams. Getting new machines for R&D, messing up their machines were all so common. This also meant: fear of bureaucracy and fear of messing up a shared system. So much of my energy would have been diverted to managing this fear (meaning, the energy lost is lost for innovative work). Now, working and defining PatchSchools Company culture, the most important decision for me has been giving my engineering team the freedom to innovate. Freedom to innovate typically translates to freedom to fail. The cloud infrastructure at PatchSchools facilitates this. If a infrastructure is messed up, just kill it and bring a new one!
Being Elastic
- Our development environment is not used during our night time. The whole infrastructure, including the cluster nodes, load-balancers and databases are brought down and terminated. In the morning, they are created anew. For a bootstrapped startup like us, this has amounted to good percent of cost saving.
- Our production environment has auto-scaling configured. This configuration helps in scaling up our business with very less expenditure for IT staff.
All in all, the cloud has increased our ability to innovate and reduced cost substantially.
