That title is far too broad – I get it, it is to make a point. I am a developer by nature, meaning I love to solve problems and have been coding since I got my first Tandy Radio Shack TRS 80 connected to my console TV, complete with a tape recorder to spin my programs to. I have used a variety of languages and tools from those early days with basic, some fortran and pascal, and moving to ASP using VB script and JavaScript in HTML, then some perl to drive back end processing. This led to VB and then C# & Java, as well as PHP, and a wide variety of other web and back end technologies across the Microsoft and Linux stacks.
I enjoyed developing in those early days (pre – 90s), and found I had a knack for it, but then a stint in the USMC pulled me away from computers for a while. When I came back into developing, it was as an automation engineer, using primarily Siemens PLCs and a combination of STL & Ladder, with primarily STL. From there, I was back into the PC world, then starting my own small consulting / web development company which led to me moving in to consulting in the Philadelphia, USA region. I drifted away a bit again as I moved into more senior leadership roles, and forgot to make time for the “fun stuff”, but I am moving back into a role where I can at least carve a part of my personal time out for development again since I am leading an innovation function in an R&D capacity. (very excited about that FYI)
So that was a long winded intro to the topic at hand: AWS, or Amazon Web Services. In my primary job, managing a portfolio of projects with IT components or focus for an R&D group in the Pharmaceutical industry, we have moved much of our stack to AWS hosted. The move off prem has been driven by a variety of factors, but it has opened up a tremendous opportunity. AWS has evolved to a highly scalable and flexible environment, which I had only a surface appreciation for until I started to dig under the surface. This site and other assets I manage for my personal use have now been moved over, and I am exploring wide range of options available to build solutions. I will post a bit about the journey, to give others dipping their toes into AWS some encouragement.
Last bit on this one – as I have started to explore AWS and microservices, I have also been exploring adjacent spaces, meaning the rest of the AWS service library, and also the emerging services from both Microsoft and Google in this space.
