Ben Coughlan

I grew up in Cork, Ireland, but I started my career in an IT consultancy in Dublin, back in 2012, where I was able to wear many hats and work in a lot of different industries. At that time, I found the most interesting changes were happening in the platform/DevOps space, this mostly came about when cloud computing made a lot of new things possible.

Initially it was some fringe benefits when you did a lift and shift to the cloud, and slapped on some primitive autoscaling. But later with the advent of modern tooling, suddenly startups could easily have better tooling and environments than legacy giants.

Then came about K8s, CI/CD, IaC, event-driven systems, gRPC, operators, open-source monitoring tools, and more. It was like a renaissance for infrastructure and tooling, two or three engineers could suddenly do the work that used to take dozens of people previously. The tech was evolving from one week to the next and it was a really exciting time to be in the middle of it. Since 2012, I’ve worked at global companies, startups, and scale-ups, I've done multi-region, service mesh, autoscaling, ephemeral environments, and more.

I’ve always been obsessed with the value-add potential, and the net-good effect in disrupting those industries, be it with renewable energy (SSE Airtricity), increasing smartphone capabilities without burning through the battery life (Qualcomm), peer-to-peer personal loans (Zopa), digital healthcare (Babylon), pocket money that teaches kids how to be financially responsible (goHenry), or faster/cheaper/safer payments (Banked:). AI is definitely another spark that will unleash enormous potential.

There are already obvious benefits in how we use AI at Moonfire and I’m excited to optimise how we run those workloads and how we at Moonfire make the most out of this opportunity. What excites me the most though, is the undiscovered, non-obvious benefits that will come from this new tech. Outside of work, I have a wife, daughter, and a baby on the way. After many joyous years in London, we made the decision to settle down in Bangor, Northern Ireland.

We’re about 400 meters from the sea, 20km from Belfast, and only 443.2km away from Cork 💚.