Episode Details

Some highlights of the show include:

• The company’s cloud native journey, which accelerated with the acquisition of Uswitch. 
• How the company assessed risk prior to their migration, and why they ultimately decided the task was worth the gamble.
• Uswitch’s transformation into a profitable company resulting from their cloud native migration.
• The role that multidisciplinary, collaborative teams played in solving problems and moving projects forward. Paul also offers commentary on some of the tensions that resulted between different teams.
• Key influencing factors that caused the company to adopt containerization and Kubernetes. Paul goes into detail about their migration to Kubernetes, and the problems that it addressed. 
• Paul’s thoughts on management and prioritization as CTO. He also explains his favorite engineering tool, which may come as a surprise. 

Links:

• RVU Website: https://www.rvu.co.uk/
• Uswitch Website: https://www.uswitch.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/pingles
• GitHub: https://github.com/pingles

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Paul Ingles. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.

Paul: Thank you for having me.

Emily: Could you just introduce yourself: where do you work? What do you do? And include, sort of, some specifics. We all have a job title, but it doesn't always reflect what our actual day-to-day is.

Paul: I am the CTO at a company called RVU in London. We run a couple of reasonably big-ish price comparison, aggregator type sites. So, we help consumers figure out and compare prices on broadband products, mobile phones, energy—so in the UK, energy is something which is provided through a bunch of different private companies, so you've got a fair amount of choice on kind of that thing. So, we tried to make it easier and simpler for people to make better decisions on the household choices that they have. I've been there for about 10 years, so I've had a few different roles. So, as CTO now, I sit on the exec team and try to help inform the business and technology strategy. But I've come through a bunch of teams. So, I've worked on some of the early energy price comparison stuff, some data infrastructure work a while ago, and then some underlying DevOps type automation and Kubernetes work a couple of years ago.

Emily: So, when you get in to work in the morning, what types of things are usually on your plate?

Paul: So, I keep a journal. I use bullet journalling quite extensively. So, I try to track everything that I’ve got to keep on top of. Generally, what I would try to do each day is catch up with anybody that I specifically need to follow up with. So, at the start of the week, I make a list of every day, and then I also keep a separate column for just general priorities. 

So, things that are particularly important for the week, themes of work going on, like, technology changes, or things that we're trying to launch, et cetera. And then I will prioritize speaking to people based on those things. So, I'll try and make sure that I'm focusing on the most important thing. I do a weekly meeting with the team. So, we have a few directors that look after different aspects of the business, and so we do a weekly meeting to just run through everyth