Posts tagged "cloud"

A lot has happened since I changed my job more than 5 years ago.

I learned new stuff, met a lot of customers, blogged and podcasted (though on other platforms), and I didn’t get to give this blog much care.

In the last few articles, I shared a few thoughts on how I think the world of IT is changing, which became the context for my good-bye to the world of physical IT altogether.

As of last week, I started working for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Solutions Architect, helping customers architect systems and solve technical problems using the latest cloud computing technologies. I’m very thankful to be able to work here, as it brings me back to the very center of IT innovation and gives me the opportunity to do lots of new and interesting things.

In the last weeks, I’ve been digging around AWS and its services, playing with stuff and meeting lots of inspiring people. So I thought I’d put together a few links for those interested in exploring the world of the AWS cloud computing platform for you to learn more about AWS:

After having gone through TOGAF training and certification, I’ve now caught the Enterprise Architecture bug, as you can probably tell by this article. It is a really neat way to add structure to the IT development process and to better understand what it really means to solve business problems with IT.

One of the first things TOGAF recommends architects do when establishing an Enterprise Architecture practice within a company is to formulate Architecture Principles that guide the development of solutions. During the last few workshops and during some discussions with other architects, three principles in particular struck me as being key to successfully developing a Cloud solution:

First of all: Apologies for not posting for a long time. The reason? I was having too much fun with node.js and the Joyent Cloud :).

What started as a small experimental hack turned quickly into an exciting new pet project involving the good old Mandelbrot Set, as a web service, running in the Joyent cloud, programmed in node.js.

But first things first: Let’s take a look at node.js as a language and programming model, at the Joyent Cloud and how it relates to Solaris and finally some details on how the picture you see was rendered inside the Joyent Cloud, including an interactive Mandelbrot Set explorer you can play with now, written as a web app.

Last week during WorldHostingDays, I had the opportunity to visit Tom (@tomme), a former colleague of mine who came with Q-Layer to Sun, then to Oracle. Today, he works for a new Belgian startup called Amplidata (no link, amplidata.com no longer exists), a company that specializes in building storage clouds. He introduced me to Wim, their CEO and we discussed their optimized object storage technology, some parallels to ZFS and the newest trends in cloud computing storage. Amplidata is a spin-off of Incubaid, a technology incubator which is responsible for the success of two good old Sun friends: Innotek (VirtualBox) and Q-Layer (The company that powered the Sun Cloud).