My personal journey with security and services started at AT&T Bell Laboratories writing source code for one of the first internet firewalls and a B1 hardened UNIX. It was fun and fascinating to get paid to hack into systems, find and anticipate security holes and write patches for the operating system.

When the world wide web exploded onto the seen, a Jim Bidzos recruited me as Security Architect at a little startup called Visto -- where we all invented all sorts of ubiquitous "cloud" solutions for bookmarks, files, photos, email. We were like DropBox ahead of our time but unfortunately broad-band wasn't widely available and we wound up with plenty of patents and not enough customers.

Somehow Amazon.com got interested in us and and recruited me to help them with scaling and security. As a principal engineer, I led the team that developed their first true service "CustomerMaster" -- a CORBA service, but we did our own ORM mapping, and exposed a graph of objects to our clients. Since CustomerMaster managed all of Amazon's customers -- our service had to be available and responsive for "SHOPPING" at Amazon -- so naturally it was highly available, redundant, and fault tolerant. Those concepts are not new.

Those were exciting times!! After taking a long time off to enjoy raising my kids and seeing them off to college, I've gotten back into scaling, the cloud, security and programming, working freelance as a cloud consultant (naturally focusing on AWS), most recently for SocialCode.com.

Docker amazes me with its simplicity and elegance. I enjoy helping companies discover how docker can simplify their architecture and development / deployment cycle and find the right migration path -- minimize the pain and maximize the gain

Are you moving to the cloud? Moving legacy systems to the cloud and be an enormous challenge -- sometimes it helps to have an experienced, architectural guide.