Interview with cloudThing, DevOps Company of the Year

cloudThing's entry focused on its best practice processes and collaboration with customers

After a hard-fought judging process, cloudThing secured the prestigious DevOps Company of the Year prize at Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards in March. We talked to Gareth Porter's, cloudThing's Head of DevOps, about his thoughts on the event and what the win means for the company.

"The event was very well organised, supported a great charity on the day, and the entertainment was top-notch," said Porter. "Congratulations to the comedian who managed to come up with some relevant jokes about DevOps as I imagine that's not a subject he is used to discussing!

"It was really nice to see such a broad spectrum of DevOps companies represented, from multinationals like Vodafone and BT to smaller companies like ourselves."

Gareth Porter, Head of DevOps, cloudThing

Porter said that his team was "overwhelmed" on hearing that they had won.

"They all work so hard and love what they do, and to be recognised amongst household names and companies who produce the tools we use every day really means a lot to us all.

"I genuinely couldn't believe it at first; we were happy to be listed against such talented competition in both the categories we were shortlisted… We spent most of the night cheering and hugging one another, and we haven't really stopped since coming back to the office!"

The company took a different approach with its entry, focusing on processes instead of technology, reasoning that "Every company in that room knew the technical side of DevOps, or they wouldn't be there."

"Our entry was really focused on the way we do DevOps from a service perspective, and how we try to ensure a balance of best practice and collaboration with the client… I believe it was due to this that we stood out, as we work with customers of all sizes, from startups to big multinational names. Every environment is different, and the tech we work with is often different. The things that remain consistent and what sets us apart is our processes, our technical excellence and ensuring we work really hard to develop a partnership with each client."

Acknowledging that cloudThing is a smaller but ambitious company, Porter said that the win is "massive" for all involved.

"This recognition will really help us attract new, exciting customers, and add even more talent to our team. The sector is growing so quickly, this award is going to really help us achieve our long-term plans to grow sustainably and show that we're the right place for DevOps engineers to develop and grow their skills.

"On a personal level, I feel the most important thing is the recognition of the hard work my team put in every day. We're big believers that to be a good DevOps engineer you need people skills as much as technical, and my team work tirelessly to balance great service with developing their technical skills. This award really vindicates that approach and hopefully will motivate us to keep up the momentum."

With the fast growth of the DevOps space, it should be no surprise that cloudThing has many plans to scale in 2019. "The award couldn't have come at a better time," said Porter. He added:

"DevOps is all about continuous improvement and delivery, and we really built a DevOps team that could deliver at unprecedented scale and speed over the past twelve months - but there's lots of improvements still to come. Of course, the ambition for most DevOps organisations is to ensure constant uptime of all the services we support, but our plans to grow and improve go wider than technical improvements.

"We've got ambitious plans to further enhance our automation capabilities through bespoke software, along with taking advantage of the wider development team at our disposal such as testing and project management, to ensure that our DevOps engineers are 100 per cent focused on what they do best, and our clients benefit from a complete engineering team as a service...

"cloudThing as an organisation want to keep getting our name out there and champion DevOps methodology across the UK, but especially in the Midlands where we're based. We're hoping to do more events, give more tools back to the community and just keep building the momentum off the back of everything we've achieved so far. In a nutshell, more clients, more services and more people!"

For a full list of the night's winners, click here.