Developing Open Transport isn't about the the technology

I have been pretty involved in the creation of the Open Transport Initiative. A project, along with some very clever folk in the transport industry, to create a new interoperability open standard for transport / mobility accounts.

It has been personally rewarding (so far) and on 14 October we launched a near-finalised version of the customer account specification for peer review & feedback.

Several people have commented that this is a pretty significant technology, which (assuming it is adopted across the transport industry) could provide a similar level of integration and openness as Open Banking has provided to the Financial Services industry.

But the reason for creating this Open Standard and giving it away (eventually) isn't to show how technically proficient I and those around me are. It is to meet a growing need that has been identified... that a customer's transport data such as: purchases, usage and concessions is locked away in an account for each mode of transport.

Steve Jobs once famously remarked 'You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.' and this is what we have done. 

Why the cost of your cloud infrastructure could be too high

I've recently been been looking at some significantly increasing cloud hosting costs for a client.

There are a lot of reasons why this is happening... but in short, a lot of additional cloud costs come from these three causes:

1. Incorrect cloud architecture
This could be: not using “build & burn” practices, failing to automatically spin up (and especially spin down) components as needed, etc.

2. Processing more data than is needed
This could be: the creation of too many environments, badly sized test databases, etc.

3. Having unnecessarily stringent NFRs for non-production
In this could be: the high specification of development or test environments, running batch jobs too often and when not needed.