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What is your biggest challenge and how did you solve it?

Situation:

This is situation is about supporting a team that is refusing to move to a newer technology stack.

Task:

As a team lead, onoe of the most challenging task that I had to do was to convince the development team to move to a different technology stack. In my case, we wanted to move from a managed EC2 cluster to a unmanaged EC2 cluster. I tried mentioning why we had to move verbally but it wasn't getting any traction. Things remained the same.

Action:

I did manage to convince the team to move to a different better stack and this is how I did it: - build python tool to show price comparison - build the entire environment to replicate the proposed change - build a pipeline to deploy app code in to the proposed env - show an extensive benefits vs disadvantes table

SHOW DEMO (https://github.com/stashedUp/tomo-documenting-architecture-decisions)[HERE]

Result:

  • The development team was more inclind to move to the newer stack
  • SRE and developer are working collaboratively to push the performance of the infrastucture.

Lesson:

  • It's often hard to move from one system that is currently working and has been working.
  • But if we don't make the effort to progress and keep our application uptodate. It would become harder and harder to maintain it.
  • It's important to see from the development team's perspective
  • Showing price comparison and showing a proof on concept helps
  • It shows the stakeholder that we have confident and it's not all theorical