tech etc...

Becoming infrastructure lead

This month I transitioned from a tech lead role to infrastructure lead.

Our product is composed of four simple Ruby apps and an ecosystem of more complicated infrastructure components.

We haven’t had an infrastructure lead in the past and the team has needed one.

Role and responsibilities

Ours is an infrastructure heavy project, and I’m excited to take on this new role.

My main responsibility will be focusing on the technical vision and delivery roadmap of our infrastructure.

I’ll be working closely with the tech lead, delivery and product managers, and technical architect.

Challenges

Our infrastructure needs work.

Like a lot of teams we have technical debt to pay down, as well as improvements I’d love to achieve –– mostly around implementing SRE best practices.

I’d love to tackle our monitoring and alerting, with a specific focus on how we log in our applications and infrastructure. There’s room for improvement and it’d be great to get the team’s heads together to dig deep into what we want for observability on the team.

Finally, there’s some legacy inefficiency which we could investigate and problem solve, partly in the infrastructure but also in the applications and domains themselves. The code has grown organically based on the immediate demands and I think it’s time to think more intentionally about system design.

I’m really excited about the work coming up and collaborating with the various team specialisms (UX/UI, content, application development, and technical architecture).

What’s next

The first step will be to prioritise key improvements, focusing on end user needs and framing the work we do whether it’s infrastructure or otherwise on the end impact. We also have to keep in mind external stakeholders in government.

Ensuring we centre end user needs can be challenging, especially when it comes to infrastructure improvements, and will require strong collaboration across the different expertise on the team.

There’s lots work to do and I’d love to achieve all the things, but I’m also really excited. One of the things I love about this product and the stack is its potential to be an exemplary service.

The overall design and infrastructure are relatively simple, compared to some other products I’ve worked on, and it’s a great opportunity to iterate on what we have and more deeply invest in SRE and app development best practices.