97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 15. Your CIO Wants to Replatform Only Once

Kendall Miller

President of Fairwinds

When you work for a small consultancy that helps companies modernize their infrastructure, you get the rare opportunity to touch many kinds of infrastructure. When you arrive at a client site, you can roll up your sleeves, get knee deep in unbelievably rotten spaghetti infrastructure code, and decide to put in place something you know is considered best practice but that you’ve never gotten to play with before. And then, uniquely, on the next engagement, you can try something else that’s new: you’ve heard about an even shinier way to do infrastructure, so you want to go chase that squirrel. Learning is fascinating, and solutions will continue to evolve.

If you work for a product company, however, and if your infrastructure has been replatformed in the last five years, your CIO (or CTO, or VP of engineering, or…uh…marketing director—let’s be honest, it happens) is going to have zero patience for a new platform for the sake of a new platform. You might be bored out of your mind, or your pager might be going off every night for totally fixable reasons. But that doesn’t mean your leadership team has the capacity to stomach a change in tooling or believes that “pouring a gallon of Kubernetes on things” is going to make all of your problems go away.

So, if you’re an engineer stuck with an age-old ...