Before leaving my previous company there was an interesting trend in the market and industry I have worked for the past few years, and that is that multiple verticals out there are considering moving their traditional premises workloads to the cloud.

That is a beautiful thing, but from my standpoint as an Engineer/Architect, I’m thinking how I’m going to be able to get involved into it? – Smart conversations need to happen and well, I’m usually part of those conversations, or in the room when smart people talks about cloud 🙂

What have I been doing to get prepared?

I’m one of those weird people that had to have a Blog, but could not stop there and created a new one… more on that shortly –> But hey I could not stop there either… and I decided to start a new website which is the one representing my own personal company AKA: My Part time job, but again more on that later, for now, lets just speak tech stuff.

This blog Collabengineer.com is hosted by a paid service from WordPress… I really like it because I don’t have to mess around with any of the backend stuff that I have to do with a WordPress site hosted by me 🙂

I’m sure that my involvement with all the cloud stuff needed by my clients is far beyond 2 simple websites, but hey I needed to start somewhere… More on really advanced stuff in upcoming posts

My high-level involvement with Amazon Web Services

My personal company, which I intend for it to be an e-learning company has a new website https://collabtechusa.com –> I decided to host it on AWS, I launched it back in December and showed it to few friends and family. This is a work in progress. I’m still deciding how to make it work without interrupting my already busy day job

AWS: Things that I had to go through and get familiar with

I’m not going to pretend that I know the following from A-Z but I needed to have a good understanding of what each of them is and what they do, some of the listed elements I’ve used for other projects

EC2
Keypairs
AMIs
Security Groups
Elastic IPs
Load Balancers
S3
Lambda
VPC
Route 53
IAM
CloudFront
Amazon Lex
Amazon Polly
Amazon Connect

My high-level involvement in Microsoft Azure

As you may notice previously, I have been recently adding some Security stuff to this blog, so I decided to create https://cybersecengineer.com to continue my journey to learning Security and practically playing with it. For this one, I added it on Microsoft Azure.

AZURE: Things that I had to go through and get familiar with:

I have to admit, I was and have been a Microsoft Junkie since I started my career in IT, but I had a very slim idea of all the things in Azure until I created my first VM – now, I’m pretty sure my list will be very short in comparison with AWS, and that is because I have put more time into AWS

Virtual Machine
ARMs
Availability Sets
VNETs or Virtual Networks
Network Security Groups
Media Services

I have to be very blunt, Azure has many services that look interesting and their interface is very organized and user-friendly, however, I think the solution needs to mature a bit more by adding more compatibility with many platforms out there that are ready for the cloud.

What has worked for me?

I have completed lots of training and read lots of few things here and there, but all of the documentation, SafariBooksonline.com, and Pluralsight.com to get a fair amount of information.

How are you consuming your cloud?

Just out of curiosity I would love to hear from people out there, what are they doing, what is your motivation if any.

About the Author:

Andres Sarmiento, CCIE # 53520 (Collaboration)
With more than 13 years of experience, Andres is specialized in the Unified Communications and Collaboration technologies. Consulted for several companies in South Florida, also Financial Institutions on behalf of Cisco Systems. Andres has been involved in high-profile implementations including Cisco technologies; such as Data Center, UC & Collaboration, Contact Center Express, Routing & Switching, Security and Hosted IPT Service provider infrastructures.

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