Separating the CTO's from Engineers

What's the difference between a CTO and an Engineer. Yesterday's AWS Cloud outage gives us a hint.

A great point by Steven Dickens on Twitter. DR/HA/Replication is where you start to test the expertise of your CTO/Architect. In my experience, understanding the criticality of an application or service to a business and building the resulting IT infrastructure is where you pay top dollar for resources.

It's about having the technical and business acumen to have the conversations. SAP is mission-critical for most companies. But what does it mean for your org? If SAP Order to Cash processes are down for 8-hours, does that have the same impact as Manufacturing downtime?

Are there external mitigations that enable you from overcomplicating your system design? The more complicated your system design for high availability, the longer it takes to implement new features.

It takes someone who can have these complex conversations with technical staff and the lines of business. There’s the need to have a reputation and the authority to impact both sides of the conversation. That's CTO level vs. Engineer level.