What I do and why I currently work for a company who is focused on providing services to customers who want to develop solutions in the cloud and/or migrate their existing solutions to the cloud. In my employer’s case, the cloud is AWS, since we are focusing on that cloud provider. The cloud providers, be it AWS, Google Cloud (GCP), Azure, IBM Cloud etc - they all promise that things will be easier, safer in the cloud and there are practically boundless opportunities for companies to innovate when they run solutions in the cloud.

Rethinking software development and operations in the cloud - Dark language Recently I listened to an episode of the Software Engineering Daily podcast which featured the two founders behind Dark, which is a company developing Dark the programming language. Or rather, Dark is not just a programming language, but a new way of thinking about software development. One of the founders, Paul Biggar, may be known to people as one of the founders of CircleCI, a well-known CI/CD pipeline product.

Cloud sustainability To what extent does running your IT solutions in the cloud affect the environment and climate change? As the trend continues that more and more businesses either move IT solutions to the cloud or increase usage of cloud solutions, the impact that a handful of cloud provider has in terms of their energy consumption and handling of resources will become more significant. Paul D Johnston has written some good blog posts on the topic and I can recommend reading his blog post What do Climate Change, Data Centres and Cloud have to do with each other?

The challenge It was back in June I believe that I got a newsletter about GCP items, which included something called the “Google Cloud Certification challenge”. I did not think much about it then, but when I got a reminder email close to the end of September that time was running out for signing up for the challenge, I took a closer look at it. The challenge is that if you sign up to complete one of the listed GCP certifications that is part of the challenge within 12 weeks, you get some free training in Qwiklabs and Coursera and you qualify to win a $100 Google Store voucher.