Rejuvenating And Modernizing Tech Stacks
CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS, is the world’s largest publisher of premium digital content and a perennial top 10 Internet company. CBS Interactive’s brands span popular categories like technology, entertainment, sports, news and gaming.Properties include the websites, apps and streaming services of the CBS Television Network such as the CBS All Access subscription service, CBS News Digital platforms including the 24/7 digital news network CBSN, and CBS Sports Digital brands including the 24-hour streaming sports news network CBS Sports HQ, as well as digital-first properties in key content verticals, including CNET, ZDNet, TVGuide.com, GameSpot, Last.fm, Metacritic and Chowhound.
This decade is going to be dominated by innovation and who gets a product to the market and the end users first. Organizations that sabotage themselves when it comes to innovation will be left behind by the ones that are nimble and agile. For this reason, evolving and modernizing tech stacks to enable the much needed innovation that is critical for product teams will be a key to success.
The last decade saw the advent of many key technologies like AI/ML, Bitcoin, self-driving cars, data analytics which is considered a very precious asset like oil for modern companies. All these innovations were made possible due to the massive scale of platforms such as the cloud, different SaaS vendors and managed services. For many newer companies, offloading the support functions onto these vendors is easier than having to build themselves. For example integrating with one of the SaaS payment systems takes a matter of weeks whereas having to build one from scratch can take a few months (or even quarters) depending on the velocity of the team.
During the last couple of years at formerly CBS Interactive we undertook many initiatives to modernize ourselves and our processes. These initiatives were particularly focused on increasing our velocity, pace of innovation and arming our developers with tools that can help us have a competitive edge in a crowded streaming space.
The biggest initiative in this area was adoption of the cloud. This initiative opened the doors to changing processes, implementing new tools and, ultimately, doing things more efficiently. The cloud not only demands changing processes but the biggest improvement comes when the architecture is optimized for the cloud as well. A general bad practice is to move the architecture stack to the cloud with almost no changes also called lift-and-shift. A better long term strategy would be to optimize the architecture for the cloud. This will help in realizing cost savings immediately and is also a great motivation for the team.
Adopting the cloud also gives you the opportunity to get a better handle on the uptime and to fix them in a positive way. Getting the team to embrace the devops or SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) culture as put out by Amazon and Google is very important. The cloud is a shared responsibility unlike the data center where one team is mostly responsible for uptime.
Another crucial aspect of successfully implementing the cloud is to make sure that monitoring costs becomes a very regular exercise. Unlocking innovation in the cloud enables environments to be spun up easily in the cloud. Unless the costs are monitored very carefully, costs can quickly rise and cause unnecessary headaches. The most commonly used cost saving strategies are around committing to spend and buying compute hours. However the biggest bang for the buck comes with optimized architectures.
Now that the need for modernizing tech stacks is understood, the process to change the tires on a moving car needs a lot of meticulous planning. A commonly used pattern is to outsource the process to a third party. This might seem like a good strategy in the short term but always bites you back in the long term. Having a healthy mix of insourcing and third party agencies as needed is extremely important from both a short term and long term perspective. This helps with employee morale as well as inculcating a sense of ownership in the team. Third party agencies can definitely help accelerate the process. Coupling them with your people will only increase the risk to reward ratio in the long term. Adding adequate training programs will be highly beneficial to the organization.
At CBS Interactive we have adopted a multi-cloud strategy and have completed about 60% of the journey. This has enabled the streaming groups within the company to accelerate their ability to reach end users with new content. As part of this process we have also accelerated our adoption of other SaaS vendors enabling the teams to focus more on innovating and improving our products than worrying about maintaining these products in the data center.
This involved training the teams using the various training programs the cloud vendors have along with hiring experts as part of the journey. We are located centrally with CBS Interactive and have set up efficient processes to work with various business units across the company. The underlying philosophy behind these processes is to make sure we are not getting in our own way. This has helped the major brands like CBS All Access, CNET and CBS Sports Digital to increase the pace of innovation by orders of magnitude.
At CBS Interactive we intend to stay ahead of the curve by innovating and enhancing our service to the best of our abilities with the end user in mind.
In short, it is critical to stay as modern as possible to help accelerate innovation for your end users. At the same time ensuring the processes and resources are adequately optimized to support the needs of innovation is extremely important. It is a big balancing act and needs to be acted upon carefully.
Adopting the cloud also gives you the opportunity to get a better handle on the uptime and to fix them in a positive way. Getting the team to embrace the devops or SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) culture as put out by Amazon and Google is very important. The cloud is a shared responsibility unlike the data center where one team is mostly responsible for uptime.
Another crucial aspect of successfully implementing the cloud is to make sure that monitoring costs becomes a very regular exercise. Unlocking innovation in the cloud enables environments to be spun up easily in the cloud. Unless the costs are monitored very carefully, costs can quickly rise and cause unnecessary headaches. The most commonly used cost saving strategies are around committing to spend and buying compute hours. However the biggest bang for the buck comes with optimized architectures.
Now that the need for modernizing tech stacks is understood, the process to change the tires on a moving car needs a lot of meticulous planning. A commonly used pattern is to outsource the process to a third party. This might seem like a good strategy in the short term but always bites you back in the long term. Having a healthy mix of insourcing and third party agencies as needed is extremely important from both a short term and long term perspective. This helps with employee morale as well as inculcating a sense of ownership in the team. Third party agencies can definitely help accelerate the process. Coupling them with your people will only increase the risk to reward ratio in the long term. Adding adequate training programs will be highly beneficial to the organization.
At CBS Interactive we have adopted a multi-cloud strategy and have completed about 60% of the journey. This has enabled the streaming groups within the company to accelerate their ability to reach end users with new content. As part of this process we have also accelerated our adoption of other SaaS vendors enabling the teams to focus more on innovating and improving our products than worrying about maintaining these products in the data center.
This involved training the teams using the various training programs the cloud vendors have along with hiring experts as part of the journey. We are located centrally with CBS Interactive and have set up efficient processes to work with various business units across the company. The underlying philosophy behind these processes is to make sure we are not getting in our own way. This has helped the major brands like CBS All Access, CNET and CBS Sports Digital to increase the pace of innovation by orders of magnitude.
At CBS Interactive we intend to stay ahead of the curve by innovating and enhancing our service to the best of our abilities with the end user in mind.
In short, it is critical to stay as modern as possible to help accelerate innovation for your end users. At the same time ensuring the processes and resources are adequately optimized to support the needs of innovation is extremely important. It is a big balancing act and needs to be acted upon carefully.
