Unleashing the power of “Ctrl + Z”: Invest in Version Control, Git and Amazon S3.
How should Product Managers who are managing teams which sit across the globe try to preserve the working applications and simultaneously have multiple engineers/ designers work on it? What happens if one engineer pushes some erroneous code and all of a sudden the world cannot access your website/ application? Here is how 1 second of downtime can affect some tech giants:
Apple will lose a whopping $1,997 in just one-second if their website is down.
Amazed? Wouldn’t it be almost magical to be able to press Ctrl +Z, undo mistakes and prevent what could possibly have led to a disaster? Enter “Version Control”.
As a Product Manager, you are the face of the product at the company and it is very important to ensure that the users of your product (internally or externally) do not get affected by the constant back-end developments/ updates that the team is trying to make. The PM also needs to ensure that the team performs at their most efficient speed and imagine how sad would it be to have one set of engineers to work on the product only to find out that meanwhile, another set of engineers made some changes to the code rendering the work of the other team useless?
Version control has come to the rescue. It is not a new technology, but over time it has taken many shapes and forms and what we have as the most successful version control system today is DVCS: Distributed Version Control Systems. In today’s age of globalization, with teams spread out across the globe and with terabytes of data being generated every second, it has become almost inevitable for companies to have Distributed Systems.
With great (computational) power, comes great responsibility.
Similarly, with distributed systems, comes the responsibility of controlling multiple versions of a document on various systems, all at one time.
Git is one of the most widely used DVCS today. Here’s why it is awesome:
- It is dependent on a decentralized model and hence, there is no single point of failure.
- It seamlessly maintains several versions of the files on different computers, all of them updated.
- It rescues you in times in when a server fails, there still is data on the other server which can be pulled to use.
- It also allows developers to collaborate with each other while working on a file.
- Each developer also has a local repository (copy of files) which they can work on without having access to the internet. If they do commit the file and push it to the main server repository, the other repositories are updated with the latest version.
- You can always revert to the previous version without having to worry about where the last best working version was stored.
Another very widely used storage service these days is Amazon S3. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. This service also allows for version control and the way this works if they store your data in three different buckets around the world (on different servers which call as three different availability zones) so that if one certain geography is hit by a natural disaster or if one particular server completely collapses, your latest files are secure on the other 2 servers.
So if you are a Product Manager who does not resonate with:
Invest today in technology that makes your customers, team as well as management happy.
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