What am I doing, and how did I get here?

After quite a long absence from blogging I have decided to return to discussing some of the new and (hopefully) interesting technologies that my team and I work with. I work for Sonian as the Director of Technical Operations, and I manage 5 very skilled individuals who assist me with the operation of our systems in the cloud. We work with lots of cutting edge technology (Such as Chef from Opscode), and where there is no software to do what we need - we create it ourselves (See Sensu for an example).

In addition - I’m working to increase my knowledge of Ruby as we use Ruby for all our tools and applications. Coming from a non-computer science background, that will be a challenge in itself. I’ve starting by reading the fantastic book written by Chris Pine - Learn to Program.

I’ll be writing more about some of the challenges of managing big data and large system at scale in the cloud - where you have no control over network and disk I/O (among other things we can’t control), and discuss how we deploy, monitor, scale and secure our systems.