Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Welcome to Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge with Dave Anderson, Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly. We want to share our tools and techniques so that you can use them to communicate your Technical Strategy with your C-Suite and business owners. We want to help you to build a serverless first organisation. We will show you how to use Wardley Mapping to gain situational awareness of where your cloud applications and business are. And then how to develop your technical capability in away that builds engineering standards to set your organisation up for sustainable success.Sounds like the tools and techniques that you need - then hit the subscribe!-ABOUT- Dave, Mark and Mike are senior technical architects/leaders passionate about driving technical strategy. They have led transformation journeys, technical excellence, cloud adoption and tech strategies in many industries.Active in various technologies including ML/AI, Public Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), Engineering, Product, Cyber and UX.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Serverless Craic Ep76 Sustainability & Innovation in Modern Cloud: Value Flywheel Chapter 18
Sustainability & Innovation in Modern Cloud: In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael dive into Chapter 18 of The Value Flywheel Effect — Sustainability and Space for Innovation.
We explore why sustainable architectures, well-designed domains, situational awareness, and the innovate–leverage–commoditise cycle are essential for modern cloud leaders navigating long-term value.
From Wardley Mapping to domain-driven design, serverless sustainability to AI-driven development shifts, this chapter brings together multiple strands of modern engineering strategy.
If you’re leading engineering teams, shaping cloud strategy, or building adaptive systems, this one’s packed with value.
📌 Chapters
00:00 – Intro: dark evenings & winter vibes
00:30 – Chapter 18 overview: Sustainability & Space for Innovation
01:46 – Short-term thinking vs long-term clarity of purpose
02:18 – Misusing “lean”: why not everything is a Toyota Production System candidate
03:04 – Innovate → Leverage → Commoditise cycle: using the right mode at the right time
04:48 – The “difficult second album”: letting go as contexts evolve
05:26 – Anti-patterns: commoditising too early and sunk-cost fallacies
06:43 – Domain-driven design & business domain discovery
07:56 – Understanding your customer & real problem spaces
08:38 – Observability, metrics & sensing your organisation
09:24 – Why blind operation kills innovation
10:25 – Resilience as the ability to respond to threat & opportunity
11:30 – Stability & security before layering in AI
12:02 – Adaptation: AI disrupting SDLCs
13:38 – Architecting for extensibility & flow
14:27 – Evolving systems & leveraging cloud innovations
15:05 – True agility vs theatre
15:57 – Situational awareness & proactive leadership
17:31 – Frictionless developer experience & cognitive load reduction
18:41 – Cognitive load, boundaries, and mission clarity
20:26 – Sustainability: carbon, cost, and efficient architectures
21:04 – Wasteful compute & why sustainable design matters
21:29 – Green software & the Well-Architected Framework
22:08 – Takeaways: well-architected → sustainable → resilient → innovative
22:41 – Wrap-up & subscribe
🔗 Resources Mentioned
📘 Books & Frameworks
The Value Flywheel Effect – Anderson, McCann & O’Reilly
Team Topologies (2nd Edition) – Skelton & Pais
Frictionless – Dr Nicole Forsgren
Accelerate – Forsgren, Humble & Kim
Wardley Mapping – Simon Wardley
🛠 AWS & Cloud
AWS Well-Architected Framework (incl. Sustainability Pillar)
AWS Carbon Footprint Tool
Serverless First principles & guidance (The Serverless Edge)
🧭 Techniques & Concepts
Innovate → Leverage → Commoditise (ILC) Cycle
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Observability & Metrics
Cognitive Load, Flow State, Developer Experience
Situational Awareness & Value Chains
Garden vs Factory analogy
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
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