Year of the Cloud

This has been the year of the cloud for me. I've spent almost all year learning the ins and outs of cloud computing, specifically Amazon Web Services. I've learned a lot about security, vpn, dns, linux administration, automated configuration management, ssh, encryption and a whole host of other things to get a self-serve portal off the ground.

Here's just a list of the things I've done:

• Written and delivered enterprise use cases to Rightscale.com
• Used elasticfox firefox plugin on a daily basis
• Set up a chef infrastructure to configure instances in both ec2 and the vpc
• Built canned application stacks pre-configured for various uses (LAMP development, collaboration, scientific analysis)
• Started to learn the condor scheduling system
• Set up encrypted file systems with encfs to protect sensitive data once an instance is terminated
• Built a vending machine computing demo using bitnami.org stacks
• Spoken internally and externally about cloud computing as it applies to application development
• Set up S3 backups of my home iPhoto library
• Matured as a ruby developer (3 years experience now)
• Moved an enterprise app to an Amazon VPC ec2 instance and automated its deployment
  

All this has been a great chance to solidify my linux administration skills, though I still consider myself a developer first and a sysadmin second.