Achieving a technology-enabled business nirvana is a goal of a cloud adoption (cloud migration, digital transformation, digital modernization, IT modernization, whatever buzz phrase you like). This is an end state where an organization has achieved some aspirational business agility where any competitor can be challenged and adapt to the marketplace in near-real-time — securely! Dear reader, close your eyes and imagine such a moment in time. Imagine that global webscale infrastructure of thousands of microservices. Imagine thousands of transactions per second in all time zones. Now imagine your current organization keeping the lights on at web-scale. …

With memorial day behind us, it is now summertime. It is time to be out and about and enjoying ourselves. Well, in these corona-times you might not want to be surrounded by the hoards of your fellow man. It is good to stay in and have some self-reflection time. I have enjoyed this confinement. I have worked from home for the better part of a decade.

Ergo, I am not suffering from cabin fever. I do however have a secret. A secret that I have just come to terms with sharing with the rest of the world. …

Let’s start with the disclaimers. I have been using AWS since 2010, I have worked in places that use G Suite, and I also pay for my own Enterprise G Suite. I am writing this on a previous model year Chromebook, and I love Spinnaker on GKE. Lastly, I have created production Pivotal environments on Azure. However, I count my AWS experience in production as several times more robust than Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Hell, I remember that day in 2011 when Cloud Formation became real. …

You obtained your Padi Open Water or Advanced dive certification — how do you stop skill atrophy? For some people living near some coastlines, you have more opportunities to keep your skills current. However, every coastline is different. For example, there may not be a dive shop nearby or you might not have the ability to rent diving gear. I live in Suffolk County, New York. Yes, that is on Long Island, and yes there are places to dive. However, I like tropical water. I like the plentiful and colorful sea life. I like tropical water (oh, I said that twice). New York is not a tropical destination. …

There are many blog posts, MBA thesis papers, and major media stories describing how retailers need to adapt to the new digital landscape. I am not going retread that existing trail of text on the matter. That path is paved and as wide as I-10 west on the way to Katy Texas. I am communicating with my technologist associates regarding how we should assist in the survivability of retail entities. I understand in the age of “killer apps” (do people even say that now?) that tangible (IE have store fronts) retail entities are not sexy. Perhaps the only “cool” technology employed by retailers is all the business analytic systems. There are organizations whose data collection and analysis are really impressive. …

Today’s software practitioners have heard the phrases Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment routinely and often abbreviated as CI/CD. I will not rehash what these are because reams of text already exist. Someone even bothered to create a website on the subject. I do remember being first exposed to CI/CD concepts while working at HP (yes, I said HP). A coworker introduced me to Cruise Control and Hudson more than a decade ago (at HP of all places). It was awesome. It was awesome because of the amount of consistency (among other intangibles) it provided to a really small development team. …