Engineering Maturity Cloud Vs On Prem And Ctos
Hey, Luca here, welcome to a new edition of Refactoring! Every week you get:
Here are the latest editions you may have missed:
To access all our articles, library, and community, subscribe to the paid version: 1) 🖥️ AI agents need a dedicated web browserThis idea is brought to you by today’s sponsor, Browserbase! We need AI agents to browse the web, but we can’t just spin up Chrome and let them do their thing. We need browsing to be fast, scalable, and cheap. We need logs and recordings of past sessions, or debugging the browsing live. Browserbase provides scalable and reliable browsing infrastructure for computer agents. You can learn more below 👇 2) 🔺 The Pyramid of Engineering MaturityAt the beginning of the year we released a wide industry report about what makes engineering teams successful. Working through quantitative and qualitative answers, we traced a pyramid of maturity, which is made of three levels: Transparency → Intent → Speed
You can find the full report below 👇  2) ☁️ Cloud vs on-prem is complicatedWhen we hear people like DHH talking about "cloud vs on-premise", we often think in simple terms: it’s either full AWS, or servers blinking in our basement. Reality, of course, is more complicated. Infra is made up of two fundamental layers:
A full setup involves making choices at both of these layers. So let's look at the common options for each:
1) Physical infrastructure 🔩Where do the actual servers live, and who owns them? You have four main options here:
2) Virtual Infrastructure / Management Layer 🪄Once you have sorted out the physical layer — how do you manage and deploy applications on top of it? Here are the main ways:
So, the choice isn't just cloud vs on-prem. It's first of all whether you want your hardware in your building, your hardware in someone else's building, rented hardware, or rented virtual resources. And on top of that it’s how you manage and deploy to that hardware — DIY, using modern tooling like Kamal, using managed cloud services, or even a hybrid approach. We published a thorough analysis of the whole infrastructure landscape in this recent piece 👇 3) 👑 A CTO’s primary team is the executive teamLast month I interviewed Joel Chippindale, professional CTO Coach and coach-in-residence in our community, about the challenges that CTOs face today. One bit that stuck with me was when Joel talked about the need for CTOs to understand their role within the executive team. Many early-career CTOs struggle with a fundamental mindset shift: seeing themselves primarily as members of the executive team rather than as representatives of the engineering team.
This shift transforms how CTOs approach their relationships with other executives:
When this shift doesn't happen, the effects ripple through the organization: teams begin mirroring executive conflicts, silos form, and the "us vs. them" mentality prevents effective collaboration across departments. You can find the full interview below 👇 And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these: 1) 🔒 Subscribe to the full version — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 1700+ engineers and managers have joined already! Learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here. 2) 📣 Advertise with us — we are always looking for great products that we can recommend to our readers. If you are interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers, and engineers, you may want to advertise with us 👇 If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! I wish you a great week! ☀️
|
