Cloud Microservices are the Present – Blockchain is still the Future

Decided to go back to work for a regular business, to be part of a team. All the crypto work I do now is as hobbies in my spare time, and my teenagers are older and off doing their own activities, driving themselves to and fro, don’t need me around as much. Need to get out of my home office 🙂

Since 2015 I’ve been involved in a more advanced section of Information Technology, public blockchains. One could argue that creating and running applications on public distributed blockchain systems are even more futuristic than cloud provider based microservices, but that’s not yet where the majority of the industry purchasing is happening today.

Much of the business growth is in cloud arena, and these companies want to hire people with years of cloud experience. Totally understandable, it’s nice to bring people onboard and not have to do any training at all. So I’m doing cloud application training and getting certs to satisfy this requirement.

The funny thing is, though, that everything is so much easier on AWS, Azure, and Google cloud than building your own servers, storage, network, and security, which is what I did 5-15 years ago. But building your own systems, monitoring tools, and scripting isn’t cloud, so apparently it doesn’t count?

As an example, here is something I did in a couple days. Implemented an open source app with web front end and SQL backend on a hosted linux box, wrote custom bash script and python program, implemented on a remote linux box, and configured alerts. Not cloud with kubernetes….but shouldn’t this count?

Of course, I understand how useful microservices can be, and how organizations, instead of running multiple nginx and mysql servers, load balancing, and scaling at the server levels can just implement a web server front end and a database backend and leave the scaling to the cloud hosting provider. A much better performing and flexible arrangement.

It’s not magic because it is in the cloud, or is managed by orchestration tools. Anyway, as I progress through this part of the journey I’ll be sure to provide hints for people who want to make the same transition themselves.

credit: Rainbow Unicorn from Fine Art America Crista Forest