because writing is clarifying

because writing is clarifying

Subbu Allamaraju’s Journal

10 Jan 2019

The Value is in Dealing with the Messy Stuff

Over the last several years, I had the opportunity to lead a few projects that were too large for any single team to execute. I also dealt…
29 Dec 2018

Contemporary Views on Serverless and Implications

We want near-instantaneous elasticity of resources and never have to pre-allocate resources or pay for more resources than needed. We also…
19 Nov 2018

Taming the Rate of Change

These are great times for pushing code to production. Thanks to the cloud, micro-services, and investments in CI/CD pipelines, teams that…
20 Jun 2018

Cloud Optimization Circus

If you are a cloud adopter rapidly adopting cloud services, but not developing the finance governance muscle, you will certainly be…
11 Feb 2018

DevOps and Governance

Regulation and threat aware DevSecOps culture is where DevOps was 5–10 years ago. Auditors, controls, regulations and compliance are not…
12 Nov 2017

Serverless: Looking Back to See Forward

Last week, I attended an all-day CIO forum on cloud in Seattle, organized by one of Seattle’s top venture fund groups. Several notable…
29 Sep 2017

Technology Decision Making and Architecture Reviews

In this note, I would like to implore you to not use architecture reviews as a means to improve quality of technology decisions. Instead, I…
18 Sep 2017

Accept | Tentative ✓ | Decline

I’m done with the excuse of not being in charge of my time. Over the last two months, I started taking a few steps to deliberately simplify…
31 Jul 2017

Paying it Forward

I recently had an opportunity to volunteer for an Indonesian company called Vasham through the RippleWorks Foundation. Over a period of…
27 Jul 2017

DevOps, Postmortems and Cloud Spend

As I wrote previously here, here, and most recently here, I’m a strong advocate and practitioner of “cost awareness as part of DevOps…
21 Jun 2017

DevOps is not DevOps

I learned DevOps the hard way about five years ago when I inherited some infrastructure and software that had zero automation and…
20 May 2017

How do We Manage Cloud Spend at Expedia

Since writing State of AWS Compute Pricing, several people asked me how we manage the cloud spend at Expedia. My colleague Abiade Adedoyin…
13 Apr 2017

There is No Pendulum

As public cloud spend goes up, will the pendulum swing back to enterprise data centers? Sorry, but there is no pendulum to swing back.
12 Mar 2017

How to Think About Multi-Cloud

Public clouds are no longer equivalent. These are platforms with some overlapping basic capabilities and yet different in many respects…
25 Feb 2017

State of AWS Compute Pricing

As flexible as it is, compute in AWS is optimized for the old capex world. It is a world where demands are predictable, consumption can be…
17 Feb 2017

Fault Domains and the Vegas Rule

(Cross posted at https://techblog.expedia.com/2017/02/16/fault-domains-and-the-vegas-rule/)
27 Dec 2016

Taking the Time

Linear thinking is effortless and easy. All it takes is processing events as they occur as a sequence of actions and reactions with no…
12 Dec 2016

Cloud Lock-in and Change Agility

We are entering into a future of lock-in. Public clouds are no longer someone else’s computers or hosted services. These are fast becoming…
24 Nov 2016

Don’t Build Private Clouds

I’ve been noodling on this post for over a year. I discussed, debated and explained parts of what I write below with several folks during…
07 Aug 2016

On Influencing

“You need to be visible and influence more to grow in your career” was the gist of feedback that I had received and ignored a few times during my career as an individual contributor. I didn’t find such feedback useful the first few times, as I didn’t really understand what it means to influence, why it matters, or how to influence.