I have been putting words online for a long time…. first with some crappy homegrown PHP/MySQL website/blog, then there was wordpress - more themes, plugins, and things to go good/bad and everything in between. Last year I decided I should try ghost - and pushed new content over to their platform, which was nice and super simple to use, but man was the cost to entry high. It took the work out of markdown for someone who hadnt really put much time into understanding what might be needed (or not needed) to use .md.

I certainly wasnt someone who understood all the things aobut github and source control - remember, back in the day, source control was for developers and infrastructure was not managed that way.

Cloud infrastructure and platform is different from the old for certain and working with the tools (developer or otherwise) is not only super helpful but awesome. It is fun to learn to look at IT from all sides; it requires me to ask questions about CI/CD and learn what that might look like, understand more about development than I ever have before, and learn new technologies more frequently than ever before. There are lots of times when I was unsure if this cloud thing was for me… it changes fast, and is always moving. How do I keep up and stay out in front of it?

Working with the resources in any and all cloud platforms that are related to things being used by your company and those around you helps - focusing on what is in use rather than trying to get out in front of all the cloud features all at once.

All at once, in the cloud - that is anxiety waiting for you

The other thing I have learned while working in the cloud is that learning is more of my job now than it was when I was in school. The cloud is fast and keeping up is hard, but the cloud is also awesome and helps keep you on your toes.

The cloud is not going away, but it isnt going to replace on premises IT either.. remember hosters? Companies like Rackspace and other datacenter businesses were the first computers down the hall that would run your stuff. The cloud is the evolution of this technology - the hoster concept has evolved to run your virtual machines at larger scale (much larger scale). In addition, the opportunity to move technology from a VM that you manage, patch, and worry about to a service running just the application that you care about is quite a shift. It has been coming for a long time and is nowhere close to over - I mean c’mon, containers, and serverless, and webistes that run right from source control… This technology thing we do is just getting started and the cloud is here to stay, so take some time to learn about it and find parts that interest you, and dive in.

The cloud space needs all the technologists it can get so we can all keep learning

This blog being in github is a good thing, the cloud will be easier to manage using source control and automation and github is the current king of source control.

Looks like I’ll be staying here when my term at ghost runs out later this year.