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Assured Success for your Startup
Written by Eric Novikoff   

I wanted to share my thoughts on ENKI can assure our startup customers success with the operation of their live sites, and hence their enterprises.  It's what we were originally founded to do, and I'm seeing from our current customer base that the world of startups still desperately needs the experience, process, and tools that we bring to the table to assure that software deploys reliably to your live site and runs successfully.

Going back to basics, lets talk a bit about the problem that we're trying to solve, and why it's interesting.  From the 50,000 foot level it looks like your startup being unable to meet its go-live dates, having problems with post-release quality, and uptime problems.  I watched this happen in the early days of NetSuite and other companies I worked at, and most of them took a long time to iron it out. This situation, if it occurs, really revolves around skill sets that a typical software startup has.  There are lots of smart programmers and problem-solvers which can bang out an interest-grabbing new product in record time.   However, what's often missing are the skills and experience necessary to do the boring work of repeatably releasing quality software on-time.  Companies that are successful with this effort have shown that the necessary skill sets are:

  • Project Management
  • Structured Design and Coding (including revision control)
  • Structured Software Test
  • Production IT (focused on fast and reliable services)
  • Business Process Management 

This is where ENKI comes in: our founders and staff have already done this in many companies.  We can assist with the production IT and BPM, as well as provide facilities to make project management, structured design, and structured test easier for our startup customers.  While we've always offered these services, I felt it was time to package them up and offer them as an agreed-upon way to describe how we work with our customers.

I'm calling this bundle the Startup Success Kit™ since it's a package of services, processes, and technology, delivered in a partner relationship between ENKI and you, that accomplishes this goal.  The overall framework for the Startup Success Kit™ (SSK) is a structured release process that looks like this: 

startupsuccess.png

 

To support this process, the kit will contain:


FEATURE/SERVICE NEED/BENEFIT                       
Cloud-hosted Development Sandbox Environment: same virtual servers/VLAN connections as the production site, but sized for development and test.  Access to anyone in development or QA.  Changes occur when anyone wants to see the results of code integration with the full product. Generally runs 24x7
  • Deploy and test code in a production environment.
  • Ability to make changes and see results immediately
  • Ability to demo new code immediately, even to the public
Cloud-hosted QA/Test Environment: same virtual servers/VLAN connections as the production site, but sized dynamically for QA or performance test.  Access to anyone who wishes to test, but typically deployment is restricted to those on the dev team who can declare code-complete.  Changes to code base made when a QA release occurs.  Generally runs when needed.
  • Test code in a stable environment that looks like production.
  • If it works here, it's ready to release.
  • Concurrent test of release N+1, while release N is being developed.
Cloud-hosted Production Environment: sized for adequate performance on live site.  Monitored for uptime and rapid incident response.  Backed up to save live customer data. Changes to code base made on a long-term schedule after testing is complete.
  • Coding and configuration problems never visible to customer
  • Incident detection and response focused on production failures rather than coding errors or detecting human error, which saves money and speeds response.
  • Maintenance is outsourceable because of defined interface to lab/QA

Operations Services, including:

  • Incident response on live site
  • System admininstration
  • Agreed-upon software release process with clear delineation of responsibility, including handoffs between QA and ENKI
  • Service Level Agreements
  • Participation in release planning
  • Joint Processes and Responsibility
  • Avoid expenditures on hiring staff with production IT skill set
  • One-stop shop for incident response on any production issue
Automatic Remote Monitoring, including historic dashboards, email/pager alerts, and probes that detect server state, optionally application software state and user experience
  • Predictively detect upcoming failures due to resource constraints
  • Respond to failures in user code or configurations
  • Respond tospikes in load
Backup
  • Copy live site state to secondary storage for archiving, restore, or compliance purposes.

These services are available a la carte from ENKI, but I'm hoping that delivering them as a single contracted offering will allow us to build a relationship with our startup customers that lets us assure them of a given service level as well as adding true value for their end-customers.  It also avoids the uncomfortable "well if you had ordered this services then we could have avoided that problem" discussion which places the "blame" for operations problems onto people who shouldn't have to be responsible for the details of avoiding them in the first place.

Postscript: check out the discussion about the fall of ma.gnolia.com due to mistakes made in IT in my blog article, don't do your own IT at all.

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