For this latest installment in our Practical Cloud Journey series, we’re going all the way from theory to practice with Nate Wilhelmi. Nate is our lead site reliability engineer (SRE) and heads up our product engineering team. Nate and I spent some time talking recently about the drivers and decisions behind building robust, scalable and manageable underpinnings to product-quality software, like STREAM:RASTER and SmartView Connect.

For example, we didn’t land on the ideal architecture on day one for either product. Instead we evolved toward the design in a way similar to that described by David Hollema in his blog about cloud architecture and designing solutions that was published in February. And we definitely made key decisions, some of which were alluded to by certified Google Cloud Architect Marc Miles in his blog from April, regarding the decision to build or buy hardware and software—and the crucial variable that is serverless technology.

Something we have yet to touch on in the Practical Cloud Journey is DevOps. Nate discussed vital security strategies that should be employed to protect data in the public cloud, but I’m also glad that we got a chance to talk about infrastructure as code (IaC)—examining it in the context of delivering software and services in the cloud, and what it buys you.

We hope that this conversational approach gives you a good feel for how to apply the patterns and tactics from the Practical Cloud Journey series in real-world situations. If I had to summarize it all, I would reiterate that context is everything. Build what you must or need to build and buy everything else.