I’ve always heard about the cloud; understood the concept at a high level but I never really grasped the implications it had for the future until I kept running across the topic during my leisure studies. Being a self-taught tech, I’ve kept my skills relevant by keeping up with tech articles from sources like TechCrunch, taking deep dives with YouTube tutorials and reading white papers.
As a SysAdmin my studies typically stayed in the realm of what pertained to my job; backup technologies, network configurations, wiring and cabling methodologies as well as project management basics for rollouts. But there was something that stood out when I dug deeper into cloud computing (or is it reached higher?). It seemed hyper relevant, innovative, and setting the foundation of how all companies would run. I was instantly intrigued.
Now the idea of being an architect isn’t a new desire for me. I’ve always desired to architect traditional on-premise infrastructures ever since my time as a sales rep for HP. During that time I worked along architects to build quotes for current and prospective customers and it never ceased to amaze me how knowledgeable they were about the speeds and feeds of HP’s offerings and how seamlessly they were able to translate business needs to optimal solutions.
One architect in particular, Robert was was always one willing to explain why one solution was optimal to another. I feel that he enjoyed teaching and getting people to that “Aha!” moment. I knew during my time as a sales rep I wanted to commit my time to the IT industry, but it wasn’t until then that I knew how. I had so much respect and admiration for what he was able to do and how much customers viewed him as a valuable resource and not just as another cog in the machine. So I left the world of sales and began my journey to become an IT professional.
Not graduating with an IT focused degree, I started at the bottom or sorts, working desktop support for small companies and eventually landing a desktop gig in the Dallas school district. I enjoyed almost every moment in this phase of life but I knew I had to keep striving forward to keep from becoming complacent. This eventually led me to working with various distributed applications, services and systems administration.
I now spend most of my time learning about cloud services and what they can do for companies. How machine learning and artificial intelligence is shaping industries in how they operate and plan for the future; what are the saving for moving to managed services and how this allows for funds to be focused on R&D and innovation.
I’m now entering the next phase of my life where I am finally being able to architect infrastructures that will provide the foundations for companies and individuals to run their applications. Although I initially intended to work in the traditional space, as an IT professional it is always important to look towards the future and not to always stick with what is known and what’s comfortable. The world is moving away from traditional ways of computing and deploying applications. They want it done faster, with less effort and at a lower cost.
I don’t think there is a company out there worth it’s weight in salt that hasn’t implemented some roadmap to become partially or fully supported on the cloud and managed services. We are deep into the 4th Industrial Revolution and I see this as the way to aid a valuable part of history.
