The Incremental Approach: Go To Market in Less Than Half the Time - Part 1
Everyone's Watchin' to See What You Will Do
The Setting: It’s 4pm Friday afternoon. I’m leaning back in my desk, finally taking a breath after a hectic week. Working for the Weekend by Loverboy is playing on the office speakers. I’m smiling, while the other folks in the office are groaning and putting their noise-cancelling headphones on.
I decide to check the CPUs on the Cloud VMS we spun up to handle the dotnet site that our biggest client’s site is sitting on. We’d scaled it up earlier that week to handle the traffic for a big press release that we're anticipating on the weekend.
Holy. Smokes.
All 6 VMs were pinned at 100% CPU. An alert dinged on my monitor with a report from Pingdom: Website down, HTTP Error 503.
My phone rings. It’s my main contact at my customer’s office. “Joel, bad news. Somebody leaked the news on Twitter. It’s been retweeted a zillion times and it’s linking to our home page.”
That explained the outage. Ouch.
“What can you do?” he asked me.
“Give me 10 minutes and I’ll get back to you,” I said. “We’ll scale up the site as much as I can, but we only have so much horsepower available in that rack.”
This whole thing was brutal timing. My team was just currently working on a project to re-tool this customer’s website to a new front-end framework, Next.js, that would handle loads like this much more effectively. We’d written the current build for them many years previously, and it wasn’t even behind a CDN yet. Nobody had ever expected this much traffic to hit this site.
“Everyone see the outage?” I called out to the folks in the office. There were hushed murmurs as the members of my team, and a few others, took off headphones and looked at each other with wide eyes.
This was not how Friday afternoon was supposed to go.
To be continued in Part 2: Everyone's Tryin' to Get It Right, Get It Right
About the Author
Joel is CTO at Agility. His first job, though, is as a father to 2 amazing humans.
Joining Agility in 2005, he has over 20 years of experience in software development and product management. He embraced cloud technology as a groundbreaking concept over a decade ago, and he continues to help customers adopt new technology with hybrid frameworks and the Jamstack. He holds a degree from The University of Guelph in English and Computer Science. He's led Agility CMS to many awards and accolades during his tenure such as being named the Best Cloud CMS by CMS Critic, as a leader on G2.com for Headless CMS, and a leader in Customer Experience on Gartner Peer Insights.
As CTO, Joel oversees the Product team, as well as working closely with the Growth and Customer Success teams. When he's not kicking butt with Agility, Joel coaches high-school football and directs musical theatre. Learn more about Joel HERE.
