SIMCAC's Chair, Mike Huthwaite, recently published an article on LinkedIn, where he shares a few stories from his career that taught him the importance of managing through metrics.

What We Measure, We Manage

***SIMCAC Members, do you have a speaking opportunity coming up?  If so, please let Sulav Regmi (sulav@sulavregmi.com) and James Parks (jamesparks@simcac.org) know.  We'd love to promote the event and recognize your contribution***

SIMCAC held our fifth virtual event of 2020 this week on “Lego IT or Letting go of IT.”  It was focused on DevOps and Microservices, and how cloud adoption is changing the IT landscape.  We had three distinguished speakers - David DeLoye and Deepthi Siddhabhaktuni of Nuage Software Corporation and Todd Callahan of Applied Signal Technology.  SIMCAC’s own John Lambeth, who has significant experience modernizing and making IT cloud ready, helped moderate the discussion.

The speakers talked in depth about modernizing and migrating applications and services from on-premise to the cloud.  Cloud migration of monolithic applications is more involved than a simple lift and shift, and it provides its own unique challenges and opportunities for quantum improvement leaps.  According to our speakers, the importance of digital transformation and application modernization, is at the core of letting go of IT.  To drive the point home, the speakers shared several stories of migrating monolithic applications, leveraging microservices, containerizing them, using modern packaging technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and running them in any cloud provider (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc) or a hybrid environment.  Elasticity of running containers in the cloud also provides a great benefit to applications that need scaling without too much intervention. Other adjacent topics such as running applications on virtual private clouds and utilizing infrastructure as code / IAAS were also discussed.

The speakers also discussed the need for an organizational culture change to make digital transformation and cloud migration happen. These large scale initiatives are more than just technical tasks and can only be successfully executed if the company’s culture and expectations are aligned. John lambeth pointed out that this approach requires top-down leadership direction about positively embracing change.  The fears of employees who would wonder what their job description would look like in the next 5 - 10 years with technology moving to the cloud were also discussed.  In short, cloud migration does not mean that engineers, developers, quality assurance engineers, and project managers will be redundant in any way shape or form.  It simply means that their jobs will face new and exciting challenges.

As usual, we had a strong turnout of members and prospective members, who participated in a lively Q/A session afterwards.  We think it's safe to say that our June event was a runaway success!