Does your company have ticket battles? Here’s what they look like: An alert fires. Something is broken. The operations team looks at their dashboards and sees healthy services, so they point to the application code. A ticket is filed. The development team, swamped with feature requests, pushes back, suspecting an infrastructure issue. This “ticket battle” creates delays, frustration, and a whole lot of finger-pointing.
Who is Southworks?
Southworks has spent over two decades helping companies build, modernize, and maintain their software platforms. They help clients migrate legacy systems, architect modern applications, and sustain complex platforms. Their teams fully embed with clients to get the job done and then step back, empowering customers to succeed independently.
They have seen this disconnect between development and operations devolve into ticket battles many times. So they created a new service called Cloud Scouts to bridge the gap between development and operations.
What is a Cloud Scout?
So, what exactly is a Cloud Scout? First of all, it’s not an AI agent, it’s a person.
The person in this role is a forward-deployed engineer dedicated to tackling reliability and innovation challenges. A Cloud Scout is a senior, hands-on expert who works directly within product and platform teams.
They are not just consultants who deliver a PowerPoint deck and walk away. They are fluent in both the language of the client’s product (business goals and design), and the language of the platform (infrastructure, containers, and monitoring tools). This dual fluency allows them to diagnose problems that live in the gray area between code and cloud.
The Cloud Scout’s mission is to observe, build, and improve the reliability of the entire stack. By working alongside the client’s engineers, they bring a unique, hands-on approach to problem-solving that accelerates innovation and fosters a culture of collaboration.
How do Cloud Scouts Solve Ticket Battles?
To help a company move beyond ticket battles, a Cloud Scout addresses organizational silos. Teams lose context when operations and development operate independently. The OPs team sees an application as a black box, while the development team may not fully grasp how a small code change can impact the entire system’s stability.
This leads to several business problems:
- Increased Time-to-Resolution: The back-and-forth ticket battle dramatically slows down the process of fixing critical issues.
- Alert Fatigue: Constant, unactionable alerts create noise, making it difficult to identify genuine emergencies.
- Stifled Innovation: When teams are in a defensive posture, focused on proving it’s “not my fault,” they have less time and energy to innovate and improve the product.
- Adoption Paralysis: With the rapid rise of AI and other complex tools, many organizations feel pressured to adopt them but don’t know where to start or how to manage the associated risks.
A Cloud Scout cuts through this complexity. By having a seat at both tables, they can quickly identify the root cause of an issue, whether it’s in the code, the infrastructure, or a combination of both. They prototype fixes, document learnings, and help mature their client’s organizational practices, ensuring that problems are permanently resolved.
End Ticket Battles for Good
At Tech Field Day’s event during KubeCon North America 2025, Southworks showcased the Cloud Scouts concept, with CTO Johnny Halife detailing the philosophy behind the service. He presented a real-world example where a Cloud Scout reduced a five-day issue to a two-hour fix for a leading European streaming service.
Ready to see how to end the ticket battle for good?
Check out the Tech Field Day videos from the Southworks presentation. Explore their hands-on approach to solving the cloud-native frontier’s toughest challenges.
