New Blog

My name is Greg Madro and I welcome readers to my new blog. It will be primarily focused around Cloud, Automation, Infrastructure as Code, and Serverless computing. I wanted to make this blog entirely my own, as a lot of the knowledge and experience that I have been working on for the last 6 months and going forward, will be reflected on this site. I enjoyed the experience gained being invited to be a part of Virtual Insanity but see this as a new direction for me. All of the information I share here will come from the constant learning and growth of my now 18 year old IT career. Infrastructure as code and Serverless are two very exciting and daunting concepts that I am very eager to be much more proficient in. I hope that the information I share will help you in your journey to greater code enlightenment.

Serverless?

What is serverless you ask? It is the computing concept also known as Function as a Service (FaaS), that allows applications to deploy and run at extremely low cost, when compared to traditional execution models found in the remaining aaS models.

Examples

One example of how this low cost computing is achieved, is by pairing up a function and a FaaS provider of choice, to only execute and charge you for the resources consumed during function execution. The concept of paying for idle resources does not apply in the world of FaaS. For instance, this blog is hosted as a static website on Amazon S3. There are no servers to check if they are running. No OS to patch or reboot. No web services to manage. It is just some web content in an object storage bucket. As of 09/10/19 I am using a whole $.02 worth of S3 storage for this and everything else I have hosted in S3. Add in some costs for the custom Route 53 URL and an EC2 spot instance I use to manage the site (Not a requirement but it makes the process easier) and other things in AWS, and my total daily cost is $.20-$.30.

Make it all code!

Serverless is not an end all solution for every application, but its use cases are growing, and it has the potential to be very powerful, flexible, and cost effective. The cost dynamic changes significantly with the move to FaaS. Now instead of paying through the nose for infrastructure, you focus more on the people that develop and manage the deployment of your applications. This is a code heavy world and it will not typically be very plug and play friendly, as many paid for solutions can be.

More to come

I will dive deeper and provide a pretty open view of the projects I am working on as I get further into the weeds on these topics. I plan to post far more regularly than I have in the past (Yes I’ve said that before), so stay tuned for more exciting code! If you have any comments or want to discuss anything I write about, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter @GregMadro.

Credits

I created this blog using Hexo and the Bootstrap Blog Theme by Christopher Martin. Hexo is an easy to use blog framework that allows me to host this blog, in its entirety, as a static S3 website. As I become more familiar with it, the design and layout will likely change over time. Please bare with me and the ongoing construction.

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