Catching Up With BetterCloud’s Stephen Dick On Our SRE Team’s Exciting Future
Last year, Stephen Dick joined BetterCloud as its VP of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). He discussed the team’s biggest opportunities, how he imagined structuring the team, and how the role of an SRE had evolved. It’s safe to say that a lot has changed in the time since we last spoke.
That’s just one of several reasons why I wanted to follow up with him nearly a year after our initial interview. We chatted about the work his team has done to reduce BetterCloud’s carbon footprint through FinOps practices, his unique approach to building and supporting remote teams, and why he feels it’s an exciting time for new candidates to join the organization.
Stephen, it’s been almost a year since we sat down to chat. I’m curious about how some of the things we talked about turned out. Let’s start by talking about the work you’re doing to raise awareness of how companies using the public cloud can be better stewards of the environment. It’s not something a lot of people think about.
Rich, it’s so great to chat again! Yes, cloud adoption is continuing to grow and at BetterCloud we hear from our customers about how they’ve accelerated their business through digital transformation. Yet something that often gets overlooked is the cumulative impact all of that new cloud usage has on the environment: on emissions, warming, and CO2 production. While some companies have started to adopt ESG standards to measure how they perform as stewards of our planet, these standards are fragmented and difficult to compare.
We launched BetterCloud’s FinOps practice this year. As part of that, I’m chairing a committee within the FinOps Foundation that is helping link careful stewardship of cloud technology to better environmental impacts. It’s a concept people really struggle with because it’s not obvious how retaining orphaned disks or unused VMs relates to our planet. We’re working to change that through greater awareness within the industry, open standards, and commonly held frameworks that help companies optimize their revenue goals while helping the environment. We’re working in the committee with people across diverse industries who have direct oversight into how cloud technology is used and deployed. This allows us to have meaningful results quickly.
Being good stewards of our planet’s resources can be meaningful both now and into the future. We have the opportunity to make a positive multi-generational impact by helping companies optimize their cloud usage through FinOps practices and showing how that can help sustain our planet for today and future generations.
I love that thought! Before this interview, you mentioned that you’re hiring quickly and continuing to expand your team, including hiring for the new FinOps function you mentioned. What do you think candidates should be thinking about in today’s market?
Future-proofing your career is a critical concept to consider. As we undergo seismic shifts in the marketplace, products and companies that seemed invulnerable during the pandemic (and were probably attractive places to work at the time), have suddenly started to struggle. Share prices are declining and hiring has stopped or slowed in many sectors. I think we’re going to see more of that.
We’re hearing from our customers that BetterCloud’s mission to automate critical business functions through zero-touch IT helps them become more efficient during lean times and enables them to focus on what they do best. We’re helping to extend their runways and get to profitability quicker. I always suggest that candidates avoid chasing the shiny new thing in today’s market because you never know when that unicorn will look less shiny. Instead, consider where the major trends are headed and try to anticipate future needs. That way, you ride a wave that will take you farther.
On that note, what other areas is the team working on?
We relaunched the team, which is now called Cloud Engineering and Optimization, or CLEO for short. This involved creating new teams to focus on either driving revenue, protecting revenue, or optimizing the bottom line.
Our DevOps function accelerates the software delivery cycle. We’re overhauling the existing CI/CD pipeline by rolling out a new suite of modern tools that will enable developers to build, test, and deploy…with joy! We’ll measure success through DORA metrics like shorter lead time. Faster delivery of software is a key revenue driver for a SaaS company, so we’re laser-focused there.
We launched SRE Active Embedded and rolled out new tools like Itsio Service Mesh that enable us to do secure and scalable traffic shaping in production. Our SREs work with industry-leading tools such as Lightstep for distributing tracing to ensure we protect revenue through a reliable product experience for our customers.
Within our new FinOps function, we’re using emergent tools like Ternary to help us optimize the cost per operation within our systems, which will influence everything from our product roadmap to profitability goals. We’ve launched a new Engineering-as-a-Service team to improve productivity across the company through software engineering. All of these areas drive or protect our revenue as a business, and they allow us to have a ton of fun doing that as well!
What on earth is traffic shaping? Will that make my commute to the grocery store quicker?
Ha! No, unfortunately not, but maybe Elon Musk helps us out there with his Hyperloop.
In the meantime, we’re working with Istio Service Mesh, which is a service networking layer that can enable A/B testing, canary testing, traffic management, policy enforcement, and greater observability powered by sidecars next to workloads. It unlocks several modern capabilities within our stack and our customers benefit through faster and more reliable software releases.
We’ve brought in capable leaders like Clark Polo and Jeremiah Drysdale and promoted Taylor Daugherty as our first SRE Principal Engineer, so we’re continuing to evolve. The one thing that has stayed the same since the last time we talked is that we put the customer at the center of everything we do. Our roadmap is powered by OKRs and a single question: Will this make our customers more productive?
Exciting stuff! With a team that has evolved so much, what does the opportunity look like now for new candidates that are potentially thinking about joining BetterCloud?
More than anything, we think about how we can have a positive generational impact through our roles here at BetterCloud. One of our core values at BetterCloud is that we’re in this together, and we often see it as a way to inform how we operate as a team. That value also has an extended meaning. It means that we should act with an awareness that each person at BetterCloud has their own network of friends, family, and community. We have a responsibility to those folks too. Each interaction we have with each other at work folds into a kind of elaborate tapestry that has these unseen ripple effects across relationships. When we create space for individuals to thrive and feel valued and respected, our people can use that positive energy and momentum to benefit their own communities, families, and friend groups.
Lastly, on more of a personal note, what brings you the most joy working here at BetterCloud and with your team?
Our team organized a poker night recently and what stood out to me was that we seem to have developed these “sticky fringes” around us. The energy on the team is great, everyone gets along, we know how to have fun, and we’ve earned a reputation within the company for knowing how to get stuff done. We have momentum on our backs that other folks enjoy being around so they join us for events like poker nights just for fun.
That to me is a sure sign of success. We’re delivering results and having fun doing it. We’re creating careers and starting socials. We’re expanding. We’re learning. We’re growing. Since we are a remote-first team that emphasizes asynchronous communication and nonlinear workdays, I receive feedback frequently that we’ve helped folks unlock a new sense of joy in their personal lives because of how they can deliver results at BetterCloud and reinvest their time in a way that works for them. They’ve discovered a new richness in the lives of their families, friends, and communities. That can have a positive ripple effect. That can have a positive generational impact. That brings me joy.
