Inside the CloudShare development team

If you’re a dork like me, you always picture who the team is behind your favorite products. I often wonder who is behind the magic, and what makes them so cool. Yes I, like all guys, get excited by action heroes and the cool guns they carry, but I also get excited by technologist behind cool, efficient, and effective products. So I would like to offer CloudSharer’s, dork or not, a chance to learn about the insides of the CloudShare development and product team.

Inside the CloudShare product team we focus on ease-of-use, performance, and user experience. Everything we do is based on a high standard of quality. But o matter how hard we work, the team remains dynamic and fun. Our development takes place in the Israel office, operations and design side span the US and Israel. The complete team brings together strong technical talent, and personalities that are interested in contributing to something very cool and bleeding edge.

We move quickly. Bi-Weekly releases forces the team to organize and focus on small elements of the product. If we are working on something big that continues for many releases, the users do not see it until the final solution has been completed.

The leader of the crew is our CTO Avner, a pro at not only at leading a team of geniuses, but dealing with product managers such as myself. The team is divided into five groups Backend, Operations, Integration, User Interface, and Quality Assurance.

Backend is championed by Asaf. His team includes Gil, Idan, and Ido. They are part of the magic layer. The layer between all the hardware metal, hypervisor, and you. His team is responsible for coming up with the deep technology and IP that CloudShare has for provisioning machines, keeping them up, and running smoothly in the Cloud.

Making sure the cool technology in the backend is always up and secure is Operations and IT. Lead by Avi and Elad, and including Eddie, James, Robert, Scott, Tom, Tzvika and Yariv. They excel where I have always been a bit weak, networking and security. They keep the unwanted out, from our servers and yours, and make sure the friendlies are getting the performance they deserve. They continually monitor the system. Pretty graphs to me, but clear indicators to them of how we are delivering to the users logged in.

The integrations team consists of code magic man Leeor (his cup always needs to be clean). CloudShare is really a combination of SaaS and IaaS. Leeor integrates the two. Be it browser plug-ins, networking automation, or some cool secret stuff I can’t tell you about yet. Leeor is the guy for that.

All the technology that the Backend team develops, the Operations team monitors, and Integration, well integrates, culminates into an awesome web application by the user interface team. UI is lead by Schachar, and lucky him he gets to deal with me the most often. His team consists of Amit, David, Igor and Ronnie. This team has a difficult task of taking complex technology and making it easily accessible. There are all the fun aspects of UI like where buttons and text appear, and the user flow. And the not so fun parts, such as warning messages. The UI team builds a friendly product that takes the fewest clicks possible to accomplish a goal. Their code is the most visible to you.

Bringing all the teams together, and checking their work, is the quality assurance team. Led by Yehuda (his ringtone infuriates me), who is also our roadmap chief and my right-hand man in Israel. QA consists of Alon, Michal, and Gilad. They are the gatekeepers of quality, and the orchestration of all releases. At CloudShare features do not get to you until they meet a high standard of technology, expectation, and experience testing. We rather keep a feature until it’s done just right. You should be a bit jealous of this team, because they get to see everything just before you do!

For me a product must represent it’s team, if it does not, then it’s just a sterile collection of bits. At CloudShare we not only use our own product, we believe in what we are doing and don’t code just to code. We are itching to get some of the cool new features on our roadmap out to you in the coming months, and do it in the best possible way.