TekBytes #3: A Certification Haiku for the vExpert Announcement!

Posted on 10th March 2018 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on TekBytes #3: A Certification Haiku for the vExpert Announcement!

I am very chuffed to have become a VMware vExpert for the 6th time this year! Last year I wrote a post about how awesome the programme is, so I won’t bore you with that this year! If you want to read it, you can find it here:

VMware vExpert 2017 – It’s not just about the schwag!

Instead, I am compelled to write a wee haiku about something which most vExperts hold near and dear to their hearts – IT certification!

I hope you enjoy!

 

Certification;

Rolling in my hamster wheel,

Will it ever end?

 

Anyway enough messing about, better get back to the studying!… GCP next! 🤓

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TekBytes #2: The Complexity of Public Cloud Architecture

Posted on 18th February 2018 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on TekBytes #2: The Complexity of Public Cloud Architecture

For many organisations, the cloud and cloud-native application refactoring is attractive. This is often due to the belief that it will reduce complexity and risk for them, when compared to running their own DCs. The theory being that public cloud architecture is simpler.

By going all in, however, many modern “cloud-native” applications are built upon a multitude of solutions, services and elements. This could be anything from a third party PaaS / SaaS provider for ID management, to “rolling your own” caching and search solution. It could even be simply implementing a broad set of management tooling for code and infrastructure automation.

The diagram below represents the technologies involved in one such solution. It’s clearly a highly distributed application with dependencies across many different platforms and cloud-vendors! It’s also not the only example of a solution I have seen in the new cloud-native world!

The risk is, the failure of any single one of those SaaS, PaaS or IDM platforms, automation tools or API gateways could leave an application offline and its owners potentially powerless to resolve it! Developers are exchanging the complexity of building elements into their applications natively, for the risk of distributing (out-sourcing?) them out to other cloud platforms.

Public cloud architecture isn’t always simples!

That is not to say this is not a reason to go to cloud and refactor applications to be more cloudy! The relative benefits to an organisation may far outweigh the risks. The key thing is that in any organisation, requirements from the business will always trump any expectations of simplicity or even consistency!

We are simply exchanging one set of complexities for another!

Thoughts? Feel free to discuss in the comments below!

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TekBytes #1 – CloudSpotting – A New Tech Podcast

Posted on 9th February 2018 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on TekBytes #1 – CloudSpotting – A New Tech Podcast

In the spirit of these new short-form blog posts (see TekBytes: A Blogging Experiment) it’s probably appropriate that I write a quick post on a new short-form podcasting project I am working on; CloudSpotting!

My day job is as a Solutions Architect at Rackspace, where I’m fortunate enough to work for one of the most tech-agnostic global service providers around! A typical week could include me talking about or designing solutions based on VMware, Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, or even just plain old dedicated servers! Add to that a swathe of security, networking and storage “stuff”, it all adds up to a pretty healthy mix.

CloudSpotting Time!

Myself and my colleague Sai Iyer thought it would be fun to share some of our learnings and experiences in designing and operating customer solutions. What better way (we thought!), than an easy-to-consume 30 minute monthly podcast for architects and engineers… In the first episode, we discuss scaling applications for peak periods and the insane growth of Kubernetes adoption! We already have episodes planned on phishing, cyber kill-chains, encryption, automation & DevOps along with a host of other topics, so watch this space!

Just to be clear though – No Kool aid, just cool tech! 🙂

For those of you who are also regular Open TechCast listeners, this doesn’t mean I am changing lanes in any way, there will just be more of my dulcet tones available on your favourite podcatcher (which may or may not be a good thing!).

Where can I find it?

If you want to catch the first episode, just search for “CloudSpotting” on iTunes or Stitcher, or catch the show on Soundcloud here:

CloudSpotting – Season 1 Ep 1 – Peaking Early – A discussion on Application Scaling

We have also settled on the Twitter hashtag #spottingclouds, as the reverse has lots of great photos, but not so much tech! 🙂cloudspotting-logo-horizontal

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TekBytes: A Blogging Experiment

Posted on 7th February 2018 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on TekBytes: A Blogging Experiment

I don’t know about you, but some of my best and worst ideas come to me when I’m in the shower… it’s quite possible this may be the latter, but let’s see where it goes!

For those of you who are either regular readers of this blog, or perhaps even know me in the “walking, talking flesh sacks” world, you will probably have noticed I’m prone to long-form communication; whether it’s writing, or indeed speaking!

Due to many reasons I won’t bore you with today (but maybe later!), life has been spectacularly busy the last few months. This has led to something which I want to correct; missing out the enjoyable act of blogging here!

What’s the plan, Stan?

In response I am going to try a little experiment based on the theory of “little and often”.

In addition to my traditional “epic saga” posts, I will be producing a new post series I’m calling #TekBytes. Not quite Twitter-style microblogging, but more regular, bite-sized chunks of content. No more than a few paragraphs or a couple of hundred words per post, based on observations and challenges I see day to day in my role as a multi-cloud solutions architect.

That doesn’t mean it will all be cloudy of course, just whatever comes to mind and I can get down into a post in a few minutes, possibly even from my phone! Some of them might even only be questions for you, the readers!

And before you ask… of course there will still be terrible memes! 😀

terrible-memesThoughts? Feedback? Make yourself heard using the comments below!

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