Originally published on Failure is Inevitable.
CEO Ashar Rizqi had the pleasure of being a guest on Google Cloud OnAir, a Google Cloud Customer Interview Series. Ashar and interviewer Jimmy Sopko discussed how Blameless has extended our runway using Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine and how the team cultivates a culture of site reliability in a changing world.
TL;DR
Leaning in to a cloud native strategy: Software is eating the world and industries are being disrupted. Underneath it all, modern applications have completely changed. It's creating complex interdependencies between these different modules, especially when you're running inside in a hybrid environment. So it really comes down to managing complexity. At the same time, user expectations are increasing exponentially around security, reliability, performance, and availability. But what's not changing is your production resources, such as the people that you have available. You need to have infrastructure on which you run your applications. There needs to be a way in which you deploy those applications, test those applications, monitor them, operate them, roll things back when needed, and manage change at an increasingly rapid pace. Historically, what used to happen is you had specialized teams, which are very expensive, managing infrastructure. That's money and resources that can go towards the core of your business and product innovations. You don't need to go solve the same problems again and again. Cloud native is a must-have in today's day and age to be able to do anything at the speed and scale at which users are expecting today. You just can't exist without it.
Cloud versus building in house: The best thing that you can do for your company is to say no to certain things. It elevates your credibility, and it shows focus and commitment to a real problem. For Blameless specifically, when my co-founder and I started, we were fortunate enough to raise some venture money, but it's limited. It's there for a certain period of time and every dollar counts. It takes energy, but you have to think about, “Where's my investment going to yield the highest ROI?”. In the earliest days of the company, it’s about getting product-market fit quickly as quickly as possible, and that requires rapid experimentation. It's a question of how do you move very, very quickly, but still build for this enterprise. That was the guiding principle for us. Making our platform secure and meeting base-level compliance requirements was very important. And what that means is that you're not moving as quickly now that you have limited engineering and product resources. That's effort that's not going to the product.
Advice to other startups: The key is SaaS economics. You have to break SaaS economics down into its constituent parts and look at each one of those things very, very closely. For example, our architecture was single-tenant. That’s expensive. So we prioritized this re-architecture effort that we've been planning for two or three quarters to move to multi-tenancy and optimize our spend and consolidate across instead of running in multiple cloud providers. The other thing is, you really have to go back and look at your head count and operating plan to make sure that you're questioning every single one of those. We did a lot of scenario planning on our side. We went back and we looked at essentials; do we want to cut down to the muscle, to the bone? Where do we want to draw the line? The number one thing is that you have to move quickly and you have to make decisions. No decision is likely to be the one that kills you. Not taking any kind of action is really the thing that's going to hurt the most.
See the full transcript of their conversation here. To download the full recording, check it out here.
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