AWS is the most popular cloud platform for enterprises, and with good reason. Amazon has massive infrastructure around the world, and many years of experience with it. Whether your network is completely on the cloud or you have a hybrid network, using AWS saves your business a lot of money and physical space. You benefit from Amazon’s tremendous economies of scale, and a lot of the tedious work involved in maintaining a network can be delegated to them.

All businesses today are built on layers of platforms. The app running your business is built on top of the Kubernetes application deployment platform, running on the AWS cloud platform. AWS is built on top of platforms such as the Linux operating system and the Intel X86 processor architecture. Smartly managed, a good product evolves into a platform for users to extract value and for developers to create new products and platforms. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Serverless computing is a cloud-based application architecture where the application’s infrastructure and support services layer is completely abstracted from the software layer. Any computer program needs hardware to run on, so serverless applications are not really “serverless” - they do run on servers - it’s just that the servers are not exposed as physical or virtual machines to the developer running the code.

A few years ago, our UX team created personas for Sumo Logic. The intention with the personas was to capture the mindset of our different users and to create a common vocabulary throughout our organization. A salesperson could walk into a room with a marketing professional and a designer, and say that she’d just gotten off the phone with a Melinda, and everyone internally would know who Melinda is and how she feels when using Sumo Logic.