At Granular, we believe success in the cloud means taking a “software-first” approach rather than clicking around in the console, creating pet servers, or troubleshooting manual deployments. While today we run multiple accounts with fully-automatic, version controlled infrastructure changes, it was not always so! Over the past 3 years, we have worked to transition from a semi-automated, loosely controlled environment to a fully-automated, self-serve, robust set of AWS accounts.

Retrospectively - we should have taken an software-first approach from the start. In this talk, James tells the story of Granular in the cloud, lends some insight from our experience making this transition, and talks about some strategies that you can take to avoid our pitfalls.