NeBu Systems needed to revisit their transformation in progress and current deployment that has grown quickly. In this lab, price-to-performance became the key differentiator for nearly all the choices made.

These hands-on labs intentionally took a very infrastructure-centric view of the world. Infrastructure has long been ignored in favor of more sexy and endearing things such as applications. Applications are what users interact with. They are the things that are most often seen and commented on, not the infrastructure underneath.

Infrastructure is getting cheaper by the day. The race-to-zero is just beginning for compute. Network has been on its way for a while. Storage is also beginning the run. With infrastructure declining in price and the cost of management and operations rising exponentially, the cost of a mistake at the infrastructure level can be very costly, with changes in strategy and technical direction nearly cost-prohibitive. Get the foundation set right. Then build on the foundation.

This lab started with data at very high levels, abstracting most of the detail away. By doing this, the strategy could be quickly analyzed and confirmed. The first part of the lab was investigative work, matching up the stories the billing data was telling with the expectations of what NeBu Systems thought they were doing. The middle portion of the lab was used to look for deeper-level data to confirm stories and find opportunities to change the narrative. The last part of the lab showed how to confirm direction by answering questions raised during the beginning and middle of the lab.

Not all questions raised were answered. That was never the intent. The intent was to build a process and pattern for thinking, raising questions, searching for relevant data, and answering questions that help accomplish the simultaneous alignment of strategy, economics, technology, and risk. Cloud architecture is about quickly triaging data, identifying relevance, and remaining keenly aware of real-time insight.