Writing about the Cloud

I used to write regularly.

I haven’t written for over two years.

I need to fix that.

I purchased this domain, gathered up all my old stuff and moved it here. New site built (with Hugo & Netlify) and after much tweeking and adjusting I am happy with my creation.

I feel ready to start writing again…

Hey Rosie! What Happened?

So much has happened since I last blogged, it is beyond crazy.

I left behind a safe, secure, stable (yet stale, I honestly wasn’t learning very much) job and took a significant risk.

I left my Senior Test Engineer job in December 2017 and moved from the world of testing financial software to go work at a start-up.

Changing roles gave me my first experience of working with something called Serverless. Everything was so different to the traditional ‘release every two weeks’ teams that I had previously been part of. Once code was reviewed and merged, it was automatically built and automatically deployed. The time from review to live on production was literally minutes.

I’m a Very Lucky Girl

I consider myself very lucky to have seen and experienced first hand the benefits of running Serverless code within a Continuous Deployment environment. I know I could never go back to “traditional” two weeks release cycles and manual code deployments. If you are interested in discovering the benefits of continuous deployment then Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble have done a substantial amount of research in this area and can explain far better than I can.

I continue to attend a mixture of meet-up groups around dev, test and agile. When I talk to people at meet-ups it seems that many companies don’t have continuous deployment in place. It can be incredibly difficult to compare working a Continous Deployment world to anything else. I find myself really wanting to write a series of posts about this beautiful cloud landscape I find myself in. I know that in my local tech community companies using Serverless are in the minority so it feels important to share the knowledge I have gained so far.

My Serverless Journey

My journey started right at the beginning, I had not held a Developer position before I entered the world of Serverless. So the story I tell will also start at the begining. Introducing concepts and incrementally and maintaining a strong foundation. After all it’s harder to explain Step Functions and State Machines to an audience that hasn’t previously heard of Serverless Lambda functions.

This list is subject to change, as I discover and explore more ideas, but the topics I really want to write about are…

• Serverless lambda functions in Go
• Creating Serverless Lambdas with SAM templates
• Building and configuring pipelines for Serverless functions
• Creating lambda functions using AWS Cloud Formation
• Building Serverless APIs that are driven by Serverless Lambda functions
• Using AWS Cloud Formation to auto generate infrastructure for running Serverless code
• Building tools to manage cloud infrastructure
• Using SNS topics to build event based cloud systems
• Building an IoT platform for streaming data
• Orchestrating Serverless Lambdas with Step Functions and State Machines

I genuinely felt extremely excited creating this list. I have already made a start and written an articled called Hello Little Lambda

Yes, it certainly feels good to be writing again.

• serverless
• lambda
• continous deployment