TL:DR I’m joining Rackspace as an AWS Architect

For people that know me and for the people that have visited this site previously will know my main focus for the last 5-6 has been infrastructure architecture and in particular using VMware as the core foundation. I have worked on some awesome projects as a consultant and as a architect. The community around this has been great to be involved with, VMUG in particular is a fantastic thing.

For the people that knew me before this period will know I have always adapted to new technology, I believe in this game you have to adapt to stay relevant and to do that you must always challange yourself.

And whilst I still enjoy talking to customers about VMware, especially none core products like NSX and VMC, I wanted to really challenge myself. With that, for the last 2 years or so I have been concentrating on more public cloud technologies and in particular AWS.

In that time I have completed the 3 associate exams and the SA pro exam, the pro exam in particular requires a lot of hard work in that space. Lots of lab time and I setup a local AWS user group, which has been great.

In my current role I was working with customers a variety of solutions, from infrastructure refresh or upgrades to new application deployments which could be on-premises or in the cloud.

Whilst I enjoyed this, I became comfortable and I couldn’t fully focus on cloud technologies. For that I would have had to change roles and change companies. So I am pleased to announce I will be joining Rackspace as a AWS focused architect.

Rackspace are a very established AWS partner and its a great opportunity for me to join a great team. This role will allow me to fully focus on AWS and dive deep into cloud technologies.

It’s probably worth stating at this point, although the cloud is nothing new, the rate of innovation from the likes of AWS is only going to be ever more consuming. I ask myself, why would any new start-up invest in infrastructure these days and with more and more services released and improving, existing businesses must start adopting these to compete.

To deploy and manage a private cloud is hard and to keep up with the innovation is out of the reach of most of the companies without the money behind them. That being said, I don’t believe the on-premises is dead and the recent AWS hybrid cloud service Outpost shows this and somewhere my VMware experience can still be called upon, at least for the foreseeable.

Serverless services continue to grow and I can see that having a major impact on how the cloud is used and how applications are deployed in the near future.

To circle back, you have to forever adapt and challenge yourself in this game more, now than ever . Technology and IT plays a massive part in all businesses now and that’s only going to grow.

I’m looking forward to the challenge and getting started.

My posts on here will more than likely be more AWS focused now although I do have a side project for a more cloud focused site, more details to follow.