My last post was quite some time ago. I explained that I’d be away for a while as I had committed my self to what ended up being almost another full time job. It was a great experience and is now winding to a close. Last game is this Saturday. I have one more film night and practice and then the game. We will have some post season parties etc but I should have some more time on my hands.
Me mentoring my other Team!
So what’s next… Well I just returned from a 3 day trip to Redmond to visit the Microsoft campus and learn about the technical road maps of some very interesting technologies. Being currently in a role where SQL is my blood I was excited about what is coming. The thing that really stuck with me however is this idea of the cloud. I have been hearing about it but not quite grasping what it really means. I have seen demos on SQL Azure at SQL Saturday’s and such but I couldn’t correlate it to my day to day activities. Seeing it explained by the people that are paid to explain it shed some light on it and really made the idea sink in.
Essentially the cloud ends up being different for everyone. There are probably pieces of it in your infrastructure today and you probably don’t even realize it. I drew some tangents to our talent acquisition and performance management solution we use at my company. We are using this as a cloud app. Essentially its is saas or Software As A Service. We don’t have servers running apps here in our data center. I’m not supporting this tools SQL Database. It’s simply a website that is the app and it’s all hosted off site. This is essentially an application running on the cloud that is critical to the management of our talent.
Additionally we have been doing more and more integration with virtual servers via various technologies. We often look to go virtual first on new installations as the flexibility and built in support and recoverability are such a win. In essence this becomes a mini private cloud that our internal IT staff is supporting.
So those are 2 small real examples of what the cloud is to me at this time. I hope to keep researching and learning more about how others are using this. Additionally I have a personal goal to find a real project here that I can implement on the cloud.
It’s starting to make sense and I see the road ahead and I’m excited to jump on the puffy white clouds!
Because I Care 