It’s that Time Again

I haven’t written anything on my personal blog for a while.

Since the start of pandemic it was mostly DevOps Shorts announcements.

But lately I feel like I’m changing. Going through another life-period crisis.

On a very positive note - I did some bio-hacking of my own - changed my diet, lost about 6 kilos of body fat and now exercise regularly.

All this gives me renewed energy with which I feel like it’s finally time to change my business reailty.

Last year was very busy. Once the first pandemic shock has passed - the whole industry quickly picked up a hectic pace.

Looking back on 2020

We at Otomato have been occupied building infrastructure, teaching cloud native tech, coaching DevOps and SRE teams. We are now 4 people and potentially growing.

During that time we also decided to launch a new enterprise with a long time friend and collaborator - Oleg. (Yes - I’m talking about Canarian.)

We had (and still have) some great ideas about cloud-native CD and where it is going. The ideas made some waves, so we tried to raise funds and make them reality.

We even made it to this overview of industry trends by Tyler Jewell.

But we found out the industry isn’t ready for our grand vision yet. Or rather the story wasn’t polished and persuasive enough. So we returned to the drawing board and then there were some other setbacks, so we are still at the board. :) But the urge to create that product, to show our new baby to the world is getting stronger.

What Are We Building?

I’m still not 100% sure about this. There is currently a number of directions - they are all interrelated and driven by the trends, needs and pains we’re observing in the industry.

It will quite definitely be based on open-source and it will be about making systems smarter and engineers happier.

Adaptive configuration, progressive delivery, smart policy management, semantic change analysis, preview environments, continuous verification and remediation are all on the map. It looks like it’s converging - because we’re all thinking about it incessantly and coming up with new angles of wrapping it all up in a new and exciting package.

You know what?

I’ll do another blog post soon where I review all of the trends we’re seeing and point out the gaps we intend to close. And yes - there are plenty of gaps!

But right now it’s buzzing and tingling and there’s a lot of this wonderful but hard to bear excitement of going through a transition.

But I will come out of this as a new fairy-tale butterfly with colourful wings.