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I’ve just been appointed the CTO of a small company with less than 10 …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. I’ve just been appointed the CTO of a small company with less than 10 employees. Companies of this size typically don’t have the luxury of hiring a professional Project Manager, hence the role almost automatically goes to the CEO of the company, since he is the product owner – Which creates a problem for me, summarised in the ingress of this article. But as the CTO, I’m also responsible for all IT choices, including infrastructure choices, so let me go through all of my choices below – Since these have consequences for the process we must follow. Cloud systems such as Azure or AWS are amazing products, with a feature list covering everything you can imagine. However, they’re also ridiculously expensive, typically at least 10x as expensive as a simple VPS providing the same value from an application deployment point of view. At my last company we paid €5,000 per month for Azure, and probably something similar for our AWS account (Sigh, yes, we used both! Not my decision though!) – Let’s say €8,000 per month to make sure we’re within the boundaries and that I am not exaggerating. I told my developers back at that company that I could have ran the whole company on a handful of VPS servers from DigitalOcean paying no more than €200 per month in total. Nobody believed me until our CTO confirmed my numbers more or less by saying; “At my former company we ran a 300,000 EUROs daily profit FinTech company for some 200 EUROs worth of droplets from DigitalOcean.” Notice, I am not affiliated with DigitalOcean in anyways, and there are thousands of similar VPS companies, delivering servers with a starting price of €5 per month. Which one you chose is probably irrelevant, the point is that a VPS is orders of magnitudes less expensive than “the same value proposition” you get from Azure and AWS. In addition, you can always upgrade from a VPS to a WebApp in for instance Azure, but if you’ve swallowed the Dynamo/CosmosDB/Lambda-Functions/Azure-Functions/Logical-Apps/Event-Hub Kool Aid, you can never to the opposite. In a small company just starting out creating its own IT infrastructure, making sure you have as much room to manoeuvre in the future is key! Hence, no clouds, only simple VPS droplets, combined with Magic of course – Resulting in that there is literally nothing from Azure or AWS we’d miss.5,000 EUROs saved per month, check! Anyways, this article is about Scrum, so let me take yet some more detours before I circle back to the actual topic, since I need to create a holistic IT and project infrastructure, agreed upon by all parties, serving our needs from every possible angle. Remember, this is a company whom in these days are literally creating their very first server, to use as infrastructure IT for their company, and hence arguably their very first “enterprise application.” – Hence, being pragmatic is a prerequisite for success – Implying we’re all a little bit of everything, and everything is a little bit of everything…;) Since we can’t afford, or rather don’t want to use clouds, we don’t have boards or other project management tools from Azure or AWS, in addition to that we’ll need GIT repositories to store and version our code – Hence, we’ll need an alternative. Installing Jira or something similar is also overkill at this stage, and setting up our own private Git server is also overkill – Hence we’ll have to do things as simple as we possibly can – Which implies using GitHub’s “Private repositories” to store and version our code, and its “Issues” feature to track features and bug requests.
