My background is fairly balanced between Software Development versus Infrastructure Engineering and Open Source versus Microsoft technologies.

Balanced is the key phrase here. Ask any Technologist the pros and cons of open source vs Microsoft and you’ll get an earful. Any good Technologist should have a clear perspective and passion to convey. But during that conversation ask them when one might be more appropriate over the other. That’s when the conversation gets juicy. Open source and Microsoft have different tools, libraries, and approaches…and they’ve both matured incredibly since I first dove head-first into the pool. But they both have their time and place.

I’m a recovering server-hugger.

My early years were spent doing software design and development. As I started working-with, then managing, Infrastructure Engineers, we were all server huggers. These were the days before virtualization and cloud-based infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. Back then, all Tech groups had to work closely with the Business groups to get forecasts, from those forecasts we’d plan in painstaking detail capacity requirements, spec out equipment, order, test, deploy.

It’s all changed now.

Virtualization has been around for a long long time. And in the past few years, Amazon’s AWS group has revolutionized deploying technical infrastructure. Yes, I said revolutionized. For the 90% of us, AWS (and others) have made hardware and infrastructure servies available at a fraction of the cost to obtain otherwise.

So what kind of strategic opportunities does this open up? Think of it this way – services can be commissioned and decommissioned with a couple keystrokes, and the incremental cost is negligible. When implemented correctly the nobody feels any impact – except for more capabilities and resources appearing on-demand. The opportunities are limitless. Seriously.

Cloud services is a particular passion of mine. I’m no longer a server hugger but a huge advocate of cloud services and the opportunities they provide. Contact me to hear more about how they can transform your company!