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Jonathan Hall
Jonathan Hall

Posted on • Originally published at jhall.io on

Does your "dream tech" solve your actual problems?

Last night I dreamt that I had received an offer for a round of angel investment funds for Tiny DevOps.

Disregarding the fact that angel investment makes no sense for my type of business, after waking I thought about it a bit.

On the one hand, a pile of cash would be nice. It would allow me to focus on improving the production quality of my podcast and YouTube channel, for example, or buying some paid advertising, or probably improving lead generation in a dozen other ways.

But on the other hand, accepting investment of any kind would completely undermine the purpose of my business, which is to help staff-strapped and cash-strapped teams do better DevOps. If I suddenly had the cash to hire a team of 15, I would be in a completely different game, and no longer able to relate to the people I’m trying to help.

I see a similar trend in DevOps at large. Most of the DevOps stories we hear talked about come from big tech. This means the technical solutions we’re most often exposed to are for problems that big companies have. Scaling to thousands of nodes, or geo-redundancy, or even something as simple as blue/green deployments. These are all good tools, just as investment capital can be a good tool—but these tools are only useful if they solve your problem.

Most of us don’t need to scale to thousands of nodes. Most of us don’t need geo-redundancy. Most of us don’t even need blue/green deployments.

What problems are you facing? How do you know if you’re chosing a solution that fits the problem, and your scale?


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