Dispatches

writing

Thoughts on engineering leadership, distributed systems, architecture, and the craft of building software.

192 essays and counting

8 min read

AI Agents Are Already Out of Control and Nobody is Ready

An AI agent hijacked GPUs to mine crypto without being told to. Vibe-coded apps ship with 2.7x more security holes. We are building autonomous systems faster than we can govern them.

aiagentsautonomous-aienterprise
7 min read

Introducing Loki's Log: A Newsletter for AI Builders

Launching a newsletter focused on AI agents, open source tooling, and the craft of building autonomous systems

newsletterpersonal
8 min read

The asklokesh Ecosystem: How All My Projects Connect

A walkthrough of every public project I maintain and how they form a connected system for AI-powered software engineering

careerpersonal
8 min read

Open Source AI in 2026: Models, Tools, and Protocols

The open source AI ecosystem is no longer chasing proprietary models; it is building the infrastructure layer that proprietary systems depend on

aiopen-source
7 min read

The State of AI Agents in Early 2026

AI agents matured from demos to production systems, and the Model Context Protocol is the connective tissue making it all work

aiagents
8 min read

2025: The Year I Went Full Loki Mode

A year-end reflection on leaving the corporate world, building open source full-time, and what it means to bet your career on autonomous AI systems

personalaiagents
7 min read

Q4 2025: Best of the Quarter in AI

The final quarter of 2025 brought consolidation, enterprise maturation, and the emergence of agent infrastructure as a recognized category

ainewsletter
7 min read

re:Invent 2025: A Decade of Attending AWS's Biggest Event

After attending AWS re:Invent for a decade, reflections on how the conference, the cloud industry, and my own perspective have evolved

cloudai
7 min read

Multi-Cloud MCP: One Protocol to Manage Them All

Using MCP to create a unified interface for managing resources across AWS, GCP, and Azure, eliminating the cognitive overhead of cloud-specific CLIs and consoles

mcpcloud
7 min read

Loki Mode Enterprise Features: What Global Adoption Taught Me

Loki Mode has been globally adopted and the enterprise feature requests reveal what organizations actually need from autonomous AI agent systems

agentsopen-source
8 min read

MediCompanion: Building AI for Healthcare That Earns Trust

MediCompanion is an open source AI health companion designed for patient education and chronic condition management, with safety as the foundational constraint

aiopen-source
7 min read

Q3 2025: Best of the Quarter in AI

The most important AI developments from July through September 2025, from autonomous coding breakthroughs to regulatory shifts

ainewsletter
7 min read

Autonomi: A Framework for Autonomous AI Systems

Introducing Autonomi, the parent framework that unifies Loki Mode, LokiMCPUniverse, and the broader ecosystem of autonomous AI tools I have been building

agentsai
8 min read

K9s GUI: Making Kubernetes Accessible Beyond the Terminal

Building a graphical interface for Kubernetes that complements K9s and kubectl, designed for teams where not everyone lives in the terminal

kubernetesopen-source
8 min read

AI Autonomy and the State of the Art in Safety

As autonomous AI systems become more capable, the safety conversation needs to move from theoretical concerns to practical engineering constraints

aiagents
8 min read

From No Phone to Flagships to Not Caring: My Full Mobile Journey

Two decades of phones, from borrowing my mom's Nokia to obsessing over specs to realizing none of it matters the way I thought it would

nostalgiapersonal
8 min read

Next Portal: Building an Internal Developer Platform That Developers Actually Use

The architecture behind Next Portal, an open source internal developer platform built to reduce cognitive load rather than add another tool to the stack

open-sourcecloud
7 min read

FireLater: A ServiceNow Alternative That Is 99% Cheaper

Why I built FireLater, an open source incident and change management platform, and how it replaces six-figure enterprise licenses with a free tool

open-source
7 min read

Google A2A Plus MCP: Two Protocols, One Ecosystem

Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol are complementary, not competing, and together they define the agent infrastructure stack

mcpagentsai
6 min read

Starting MIT's AI and ML Professional Education Program

Why I enrolled in MIT's professional education program for AI and machine learning, and what I expect to gain as a practitioner who builds AI systems daily

aicareer
9 min read

Inside Loki Mode: 41 Agents, 8 Swarms, and the RARV Cycle

A technical deep dive into how Loki Mode orchestrates 41 specialized AI agents across 8 swarms using the Reason-Act-Reflect-Verify cycle

agentsai
7 min read

The MCP Marketplace: An App Store for AI Tools

The Model Context Protocol is evolving from a specification into an ecosystem, and the marketplace model will define how AI agents access the world

mcpai
7 min read

Loki Mode Goes Provider Agnostic: v5.0 and Multi-Provider Support

Loki Mode v5.0 introduces provider-agnostic orchestration across Claude, Codex, and Gemini CLI with zero architecture changes

agentsai
7 min read

DeepSeek R1: China's Open Source AI Moment

DeepSeek R1 proves that frontier AI research is no longer exclusive to Silicon Valley, and open source is the accelerant

ai
8 min read

Technical Leaders Must Build: Why AI Leadership Requires Hands on Keyboards

If you lead engineering teams and you are not building with AI tools yourself, you are making decisions based on other people's understanding

leadershipai
7 min read

2024: The Year AI Agents Became Real

Looking back on 2024, the year AI agents went from predictions to production and everything I shipped along the way

aiagentspersonal
6 min read

From Zero to Global Adoption: Open Source Virality

How an enterprise MCP server collection went from a personal project to globally adopted open source infrastructure

open-sourcecareer
6 min read

re:Invent 2024: AWS Goes Agent-First

AWS re:Invent 2024 signals a fundamental shift: Amazon is rebuilding its cloud platform around AI agents as first-class citizens

cloudai
9 min read

Loki Mode is Born: Building a Multi-Agent Autonomous System

Introducing Loki Mode — a multi-agent autonomous system for Claude Code with 41 agent types across 8 swarms

aiagentsmcpopen-source
6 min read

The 2024 Election and the AI Misinformation Challenge

The 2024 US presidential election tested our ability to handle AI-generated misinformation, and the results are sobering

aipersonal
7 min read

Claude Computer Use: AI That Operates Your Computer

Anthropic's Claude computer use capability lets AI control your screen, keyboard, and mouse, and the implications for agent systems are enormous

aiagents
7 min read

Leading AI Teams: What Is Different

Leading AI-powered engineering teams requires a fundamentally different approach than leading traditional cloud infrastructure teams

leadershipai
6 min read

OpenAI o1: Chain of Thought Changes Everything

OpenAI's o1 model introduces a new paradigm: models that think before they answer, with profound implications for AI agent systems

ai
6 min read

A2A: When AI Agents Talk to Each Other

Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol opens a new frontier: AI agents that can discover, communicate with, and delegate to other agents

agentsai
6 min read

AI Marketplaces: The Next Platform War

MCP marketplaces are emerging as the next platform battleground, and the winner will define how AI agents access the world

mcpai
6 min read

25 Enterprise MCP Servers in One Sprint

How I built 25+ production-grade MCP servers and what I learned about shipping AI infrastructure at speed

mcpagents
7 min read

MCP: The Protocol That Connects AI to Everything

A deep dive into the Model Context Protocol and why it is the most important infrastructure standard for the AI agent era

mcpai
6 min read

Google I/O 2024: Gemini Everywhere

Google I/O 2024 made one thing clear: Google is embedding Gemini into every product, every surface, every interaction

ai
7 min read

Building LokiMCPUniverse: Enterprise MCP Servers at Scale

Launching LokiMCPUniverse, a collection of enterprise-grade MCP servers that give AI agents access to real tools and infrastructure

mcpaiagents
6 min read

NVIDIA GTC: Jensen Huang and the $2 Trillion AI Engine

NVIDIA GTC 2024 was not just a product launch; it was a declaration that GPU infrastructure is the foundation of the AI era

ai
6 min read

Claude 3 Opus: The Best LLM I Have Ever Used

Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus is not just an incremental improvement; it changes what is possible with AI-assisted engineering

ai
6 min read

Sora: OpenAI Just Changed Video Forever

OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model represents a paradigm shift in content creation and raises profound questions about reality

ai
6 min read

2024: The Year AI Agents Take Over

Why 2024 will be the year AI agents move from research demos to production workflow automation

aiagents
8 min read

2023: The Year LLMs Ate the World

Looking back on a year that transformed AI from a research curiosity into a force reshaping every industry

aipersonal
8 min read

Mixtral 8x7B and the Rise of Mixture of Experts

Mistral AI's Mixtral model demonstrates that mixture of experts architectures can deliver frontier-class performance efficiently

ai
7 min read

Google Gemini: DeepMind's Multimodal Answer to GPT-4

Google launches Gemini, its most capable AI model, built from the ground up for multimodal reasoning

ai
7 min read

re:Invent 2023: Amazon Bedrock and the Enterprise GenAI Stack

AWS re:Invent 2023 puts generative AI at the center of Amazon's cloud strategy with Bedrock and new services

cloudai
7 min read

The OpenAI Board Crisis: Five Days That Shook AI

Sam Altman's firing and rehiring at OpenAI exposes the tensions at the heart of AI development

ai
7 min read

OpenAI DevDay: GPTs, Assistants API, and the Platform Play

OpenAI's first developer conference reveals its vision for an AI application platform

aiagents
6 min read

My First Steps in AI Research

Documenting my journey from infrastructure engineer to hands-on AI researcher and builder

aicareer
7 min read

Tool Use, Function Calling, and the Future of AI Integration

The emergence of structured tool use and function calling in LLMs points toward a protocol-driven future for AI integration

mcpai
7 min read

Meta's Llama 2 and the Rise of Open Source LLMs

Llama 2's open release changes the dynamics of AI development and gives enterprises new deployment options

ai
7 min read

LangChain, LlamaIndex, and the AI Tooling Explosion

The AI framework ecosystem is exploding with tools for building LLM-powered applications

aiagents
6 min read

Anthropic and Claude: The Safety-First Approach to AI

Anthropic's Claude model and Constitutional AI represent a fundamentally different philosophy in the AI race

ai
6 min read

Pivoting My Career Toward AI

After years in cloud infrastructure, I am making a deliberate shift toward AI and large language models

aicareer
7 min read

AutoGPT and the Dawn of Autonomous AI Agents

AutoGPT introduces the concept of autonomous AI agents that can decompose tasks and execute multi-step plans

aiagents
6 min read

GPT-4 Is Multimodal and It Changes Everything

GPT-4 launches with multimodal capabilities, passing professional exams and setting a new benchmark for AI

ai
7 min read

Google Bard and the LLM Race Heats Up

Google announces Bard in response to ChatGPT, and the large language model race officially begins

ai
6 min read

Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Bet on OpenAI and the AI Arms Race

Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI signals a new era of AI competition among the tech giants

ai
6 min read

2022: The Year AI Broke Through

Looking back at a year that saw AI go from research curiosity to mainstream phenomenon, while I published two books and watched the world change

aipersonal
6 min read

re:Invent 2022: AWS Bets on Generative AI

AWS re:Invent this year revealed a clear strategic pivot toward generative AI infrastructure, and the cloud landscape is about to change

cloud
6 min read

ChatGPT Launches: The iPhone Moment for AI

OpenAI just released ChatGPT and it is the first AI product that makes non-technical people understand why artificial intelligence matters

ai
6 min read

Losing Interest in Phones Too

After losing my passion for cars earlier this year, I am realizing the same thing has happened with smartphones

nostalgiapersonal
5 min read

AI Research Is Moving Faster Than Anyone Can Track

The velocity of AI research has reached a point where even dedicated practitioners cannot keep up with the pace of significant breakthroughs

ai
6 min read

CKAD Certification: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

Passed the CKAD exam and earned another Kubernetes certification, reinforcing my conviction that container orchestration is fundamental infrastructure

kubernetescareer
6 min read

Stable Diffusion: AI Art Goes Open Source

Stability AI just open-sourced a state-of-the-art image generation model, and the implications of putting this technology in everyone's hands are profound

ai
6 min read

Losing Interest in Cars

With a full Tesla fleet in the household, the novelty of cars has faded in a way I did not expect

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

James Webb's First Images Put Things in Perspective

NASA just released the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and they are redefining our view of the universe

personal
6 min read

From Strangers to Founders: Published

My second book this year tells the immigration story that shaped everything, from arriving in America as a stranger to building a career in tech

bookspersonal
6 min read

Mastering Cloud Engineering: Published

My first book is published, distilling years of hands-on cloud architecture experience into a comprehensive guide

bookscloudcareer
5 min read

Elon Buys Twitter: The Most Chaotic Tech Deal in Memory

Elon Musk just agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, and the way it happened is as remarkable as the deal itself

personal
5 min read

DALL-E 2: AI Creates Art

OpenAI just showed us an AI system that generates photorealistic images from text descriptions, and the implications are staggering

ai
5 min read

Russia Invades Ukraine: Technology in Modern War

The invasion of Ukraine is showing us in real time how technology has fundamentally changed the nature of warfare

personal
5 min read

Microsoft Acquires Activision Blizzard

The biggest gaming acquisition in history just happened, and it says more about the future of tech than about gaming

personal
7 min read

The Flip Phone Revival: Galaxy Z Flip and Nostalgia Engineering

Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip3 brought the flip phone back from the dead, and using it feels like a conversation between past and future

nostalgiapersonal
7 min read

re:Invent 2021: AWS and the $71 Billion Run Rate

AWS re:Invent just wrapped, and the numbers tell a story about cloud dominance that the industry cannot ignore

cloud
7 min read

Writing From Strangers to Founders

I am writing a book about the immigrant journey from arriving in America to building a life, and the story is more personal than anything I have published

bookspersonal
6 min read

Facebook Becomes Meta: Visionary or Desperate?

Mark Zuckerberg just renamed his company and bet everything on the metaverse, and I have questions

personal
6 min read

The Flagship Phone Rotation: Samsung, Apple, and Pixel

I rotate between Samsung, Apple, and Google flagships every year, and the camera comparisons alone justify the habit

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

Billionaires in Space

Bezos and Branson went to space within days of each other, and the discourse tells us more about Earth than about orbit

personal
6 min read

The Tesla Fleet Is Complete

With the Model X, every current Tesla model is in the driveway, and the journey to get here taught me more about obsession than cars

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

Writing a Book About Cloud Engineering

I am writing Mastering Cloud Engineering, and the process is teaching me as much as the content itself

bookscareer
6 min read

The NFT Craze: Digital Ownership or Tulips?

Beeple just sold a digital artwork for 69 million dollars, and I genuinely cannot tell if this is revolutionary or insane

personal
6 min read

AI-Assisted Coding Tools Are Emerging

GitHub Copilot and TabNine hint at a future where AI writes code alongside us, and I am paying close attention

ai
8 min read

2020: The Year Everything Changed

A year that began with a mysterious virus in Wuhan ended with the world permanently altered, and the acceleration of trends that will define the next decade

personalcareer
8 min read

re:Invent 2020: Virtual, Massive, and ECS Anywhere

AWS re:Invent went fully virtual and announced ECS Anywhere, extending container orchestration beyond the cloud and into any infrastructure you operate

cloud
7 min read

Apple M1: ARM Beats x86

Apple is about to ship ARM-based Macs, and if the rumors are right, this will be the most significant architectural shift in personal computing since the move from PowerPC

personal
7 min read

The US Election and Social Media's Reckoning

The 2020 US election exposed the fundamental tension between platform scale and platform responsibility, and there are no easy answers

personal
7 min read

Terraform 0.13: Provider Requirements Done Right

Terraform 0.13 introduces proper provider source addresses and module-level provider requirements, fixing one of the most persistent pain points in infrastructure as code

terraformcloud
6 min read

Kubernetes 1.19: The Platform Is Mature

Kubernetes 1.19 extends the support window to one year and moves Ingress to GA, signaling that the platform has crossed from innovation to infrastructure

kubernetescloud
6 min read

Tesla Model Y: My Third Tesla

Taking delivery of a Model Y and reflecting on how Tesla went from a curiosity to the default choice for anyone paying attention to the automotive industry

nostalgiapersonal
7 min read

GPT-3: AI Can Write

OpenAI's GPT-3 paper demonstrates that scaling a language model to 175 billion parameters produces something qualitatively different from what came before

ai
6 min read

The World Went Remote Overnight

COVID-19 just forced the largest remote work experiment in human history, and cloud infrastructure is the only reason it is working at all

cloudpersonal
6 min read

A Virus in Wuhan: How Technology Responds

Reports of a novel coronavirus are emerging from China, and the tech response is already revealing how the world handles crises differently in 2020

personal
8 min read

The 2010s: A Decade of Cloud, Mobile, and Early AI

Reflecting on a decade that transformed technology and my career, from Linux administration to cloud infrastructure leadership

personalcareer
7 min read

re:Invent 2019: Outposts, EKS on Fargate, and the Hybrid Future

Key announcements from AWS re:Invent 2019, including Outposts general availability, EKS on Fargate, and what they mean for enterprise infrastructure

cloudkubernetes
8 min read

Leading Cloud Infrastructure: Lessons After Four Years

A retrospective on four years of leading cloud infrastructure teams, from technical decisions to organizational dynamics

leadershipcareer
6 min read

Tesla Model S: The Second Tesla Joins the Fleet

Adding a Model S to the garage alongside the Model 3 and what it means to go fully electric

nostalgiapersonal
7 min read

Containerizing Enterprise Java: From WAR to Docker

Patterns and pitfalls of containerizing legacy Java WAR applications running on JBoss and WebLogic

clouddocker
7 min read

The Rise of GitOps: ArgoCD and Flux

GitOps is changing how we think about Kubernetes deployments by making Git the single source of truth for cluster state

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

The First Photo of a Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a black hole in M87, and the technology behind it is as remarkable as the science

personal
7 min read

Tier-1 Commerce Payment Systems Migration

Migrating payment processing systems to the cloud while maintaining PCI compliance and zero downtime

cloud
6 min read

Three Flagship Phones: Samsung, Apple, Pixel

Living with all three flagship ecosystems simultaneously and what each one gets right

nostalgiapersonal
8 min read

Mentoring Engineers and Leading a Team of Ten

What I have learned about mentoring, team building, and the transition from individual contributor to engineering leader

leadershipcareer
7 min read

re:Invent 2018: Lambda Layers, Transit Gateway, and the Services That Matter

A practitioner's take on the AWS re:Invent 2018 announcements that will actually change how we build

cloud
7 min read

GitHub Is Now Microsoft's

Microsoft closed its acquisition of GitHub on October 26 and the open source world is processing what this means

personal
7 min read

IAM Policies Deep Dive: Least Privilege at Enterprise Scale

Designing IAM policies, SCPs, and permission boundaries that enforce least privilege across hundreds of AWS accounts

cloud
8 min read

Lambda, RDS, Oracle on EC2: Hybrid Data Tier Patterns

Designing data tier architectures that bridge serverless Lambda functions with traditional Oracle databases on AWS

cloud
7 min read

CKA: Becoming a Certified Kubernetes Administrator

I passed the CKA exam and here is what it actually takes to master Kubernetes administration

kubernetescareer
7 min read

Contributing to CNCF: My Kubernetes Open Source Journey

How getting involved with CNCF and the Kubernetes community changed the way I think about infrastructure

kubernetescareer
7 min read

I Bought My First Tesla Model 3

Taking delivery of a Tesla Model 3 and experiencing what it means when your car is a software platform

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

SpaceX Falcon Heavy: The Most Inspiring Launch I Have Ever Watched

SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy two days ago and I cannot stop thinking about what it means for engineering

personal
7 min read

Kubernetes vs ECS: An Enterprise Container Orchestration Comparison

When to choose Kubernetes and when to choose ECS, based on real experience operating both at enterprise scale

kubernetescloud
8 min read

VPC Networking at Enterprise Scale

Designing VPC topologies, Transit Gateway patterns, peering strategies, and security group architectures for hundreds of AWS accounts

cloud
8 min read

Akamai-Fronted Web Applications on AWS

Designing enterprise web tier architecture with Akamai CDN in front of AWS origins, including WAF, origin shield, and caching strategies

cloud
7 min read

Active-Active Multi-Region Architecture with Route 53

Designing active-active multi-region deployments with Route 53 failover, health checks, and data replication strategies

cloud
7 min read

Storage Gateways, EFS, and AWS Batch: Solving Enterprise Storage Challenges

How we designed storage architectures for media workflows using EFS, AWS Batch, and Storage Gateway

cloud
6 min read

Terraform as the IaC Standard Across Hundreds of AWS Accounts

How we standardized Terraform across hundreds of AWS accounts with shared modules, remote state, and workspace conventions

terraformcloud
6 min read

Dockerizing Legacy Apps: From Monolith to ECS

How we containerized a monolithic Java application and deployed it to AWS ECS with a full CI/CD pipeline

clouddockerawsecs
7 min read

Migrating Monolithic Apps to AWS: The 6Rs Framework in Practice

Enterprise cloud migration is not a single strategy; it is six strategies applied systematically across hundreds of applications

cloud
5 min read

Day One at a Major Entertainment Company

Starting a new chapter as a cloud architect at one of the world's largest entertainment enterprises

careerpersonal
7 min read

re:Invent 2016: Serverless Goes Mainstream

AWS re:Invent just wrapped up and the message is clear: serverless is no longer experimental, it is the direction

cloud
7 min read

AWS Organizations and Multi-Account Strategy

Designing a multi-account AWS architecture for enterprise workloads using Organizations, SCPs, and IAM patterns

cloud
7 min read

Enterprise Migration: Lift-and-Shift vs. Refactor

When to move workloads to the cloud as-is and when to redesign them, learned from real enterprise migration decisions

cloud
6 min read

Why I Bought a BMW 540i

On falling in love with a twenty-year-old German sedan and making my first big purchase in America

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

Pokemon Go and the Power of AR

Pokemon Go launched five days ago and the entire world seems to be outside catching virtual creatures

personal
6 min read

Starting at a Telecom Giant: Enterprise Cloud Architect

My first corporate role in America, designing cloud architecture at enterprise scale

careercloud
6 min read

Leaving Texas A&M, Entering Industry

After years of research and coursework, I am closing the grad school chapter and stepping into the industry

careerpersonal
6 min read

AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol: AI's Deep Blue Moment

DeepMind's AlphaGo just defeated one of the greatest Go players in history, and this feels fundamentally different from Deep Blue

ai
5 min read

Gravitational Waves Detected

LIGO just confirmed gravitational waves exist, and a hundred years of Einsteinian prediction suddenly became observable reality

personal
8 min read

Grad School, Research, and Cloud Computing

Reflecting on a year of graduate research, distributed systems learnings, and the widening bridge between academia and industry

cloudcareer
7 min read

Red Hat Acquires Ansible

Red Hat acquires Ansible and the configuration management landscape shifts, with implications for how we think about infrastructure automation

cloudterraform
7 min read

re:Invent 2015: AWS Is Unstoppable

AWS re:Invent 2015 showcased an ecosystem in overdrive, with new services, aggressive pricing, and a vision for cloud that keeps widening

cloud
7 min read

Architecting WordPress on AWS: EC2, RDS, and S3

A technical deep dive into the architecture decisions, performance tuning, and lessons learned from running WordPress ecommerce on AWS

cloud
7 min read

Kubernetes 1.0 and the Birth of CNCF

Kubernetes hits 1.0 and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation forms, signaling that container orchestration is ready for the enterprise

kubernetescloud
7 min read

AWS-Hosted WordPress Ecommerce POC

Building a proof of concept ecommerce site with WordPress, WooCommerce, and AWS services to bridge theory and practice

cloud
7 min read

Apple Watch Launches Wearables into the Mainstream

The Apple Watch arrived and with it a new computing form factor that raises fascinating questions about human-computer interaction

personal
7 min read

Cloud Computing Research with Dr. Young Lee

Diving into cloud computing research in grad school, exploring virtualization, resource allocation, and the academic lens on distributed systems

cloudcareer
7 min read

First Week at Texas A&M Research Lab

Starting my MS in Computer Science, navigating a new country, and stepping into research assistant life

careerpersonal
7 min read

2014: The Year of Containers

Looking back at a year that fundamentally changed how the industry thinks about deploying and running software

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

Accepted to Texas A&M: America, Here I Come

I got my acceptance letter for MS in Computer Science and my life is about to change completely

careerpersonal
7 min read

re:Invent 2014: Lambda, Aurora, and the Serverless Future

AWS Lambda might be the most important cloud announcement since EC2 and I am still wrapping my head around it

cloud
7 min read

Terraform: The IaC Tool I Have Been Waiting For

HashiCorp just released Terraform and it fills the infrastructure-as-code gap that has been bothering me for months

terraformcloud
7 min read

Docker 1.0: Production Ready

Docker hits version 1.0 and the container ecosystem is exploding in every direction

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

Google Announces Kubernetes

Google just open-sourced their container orchestration system and this could change everything about how we run infrastructure

kubernetescloud
7 min read

CoreOS: A Container-Optimized OS

CoreOS is rethinking what a server operating system should be in a world built on containers

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

Moto Razr: My Uncle Brought From America

The Motorola Razr and the tradition of uncles bringing impossible gadgets from America

nostalgiapersonal
8 min read

From No Phone to Nokia 6230

Growing up in an era without mobile phones and the day my uncle brought home a Nokia 6230 with a camera

nostalgiapersonal
6 min read

AWS re:Invent 2013: Announcements That Matter

Following AWS re:Invent remotely and picking out the announcements that will actually change how we work

cloud
7 min read

What Microservices Actually Mean

Everyone is talking about microservices but most explanations miss the point entirely

cloud
6 min read

Chef vs Ansible: Which Tool?

A hands-on comparison of Chef and Ansible from someone who actually needs to pick one for production infrastructure

cloudterraform
7 min read

Security Automation: Days to Hours Provisioning

How we cut server provisioning from five days to under four hours using automation and VMware templates

cloud
6 min read

NSA PRISM: The Internet's Innocence Dies

Edward Snowden just revealed that the US government has been surveilling internet communications on a massive scale

personal
6 min read

Starting as Lead Systems Engineer

New role managing a Linux NOC team and learning what leadership actually means

career
5 min read

Docker Changes Everything About Deployment

Docker 0.1 just dropped and containers are suddenly accessible to everyone, not just kernel wizards

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

2012: The Year the Cloud Became Real

A year-end reflection on how 2012 marked the turning point when cloud computing stopped being experimental and became the default

cloudpersonal
7 min read

VMware, RAID, and Storage Architecture Lessons

Deep lessons from enterprise storage architecture work, including RAID configurations, VMware storage design, and the failures that taught me the most

cloud
7 min read

Ansible, Puppet, Chef: The Configuration Management Wars

A practitioner's comparison of the three major configuration management tools and why I think the landscape is about to get interesting

cloudterraform
7 min read

Raspberry Pi and the Maker Movement

The Raspberry Pi Model B shipped earlier this year and it reignited something I forgot I had: the joy of tinkering

personal
7 min read

Google Compute Engine and the Three-Horse Cloud Race

Google just announced Compute Engine at I/O, and suddenly the cloud is a three-way competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP

cloud
7 min read

Running a Linux NOC: Chasing 99.9% Uptime

What it actually takes to keep Linux infrastructure running at 99.9% uptime, from the perspective of someone who lives in the NOC

cloudcareer
7 min read

AWS DynamoDB: Fully Managed NoSQL Changes the Game

DynamoDB went GA earlier this year and I think it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about databases

cloud
6 min read

Linux Containers Before Docker: LXC, Cgroups, and Namespaces

The container landscape before Docker existed, and why LXC, cgroups, and namespaces matter more than most people realize

cloudkubernetes
7 min read

The Rise of DevOps: When Developers and Ops Stop Fighting

The DevOps movement is breaking down the wall between development and operations, and it is about time

cloud
6 min read

Remembering Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th and the world lost its greatest product mind

personal
7 min read

Hadoop Is Eating the Enterprise

MapReduce, HDFS, and the big data infrastructure stack are quietly reshaping how enterprises think about data processing

cloud
6 min read

Steve Jobs Resigns: End of an Era

Steve Jobs just resigned as CEO of Apple, and it feels like the end of something important in technology

personal
7 min read

VMware Certifications and the Enterprise Virtualization Landscape

Studying for VMware certifications and discovering how deeply virtualization has reshaped enterprise infrastructure

cloudcareer
6 min read

AWS CloudFormation: Infrastructure as Code Begins

AWS just launched CloudFormation and the idea of declaring your infrastructure in a template file is quietly revolutionary

cloudterraform
6 min read

Watson Wins Jeopardy: AI Becomes Dinner Table Talk

IBM Watson just defeated Jeopardy champions on live television, and suddenly everyone has an opinion about artificial intelligence

ai
6 min read

Instagram Launches and Mobile-First Becomes the Default

A photo sharing app called Instagram just proved that mobile-first is not a compromise, it is a strategy

personal
7 min read

NoSQL Is Having Its Moment

MongoDB, Cassandra, and the database paradigm shift that is making relational purists uncomfortable

cloud
6 min read

The Linux Admin Life: RHEL in Production

What day-to-day Linux system administration actually looks like when real systems depend on you

cloudcareer
6 min read

Platform as a Service Goes Mainstream

Heroku and the rise of PaaS are changing how developers think about deploying applications

cloud
6 min read

OpenStack: The Open Source Cloud Revolution

Rackspace and NASA are building an open source cloud platform and it could change everything

cloud
6 min read

Why I Want a Masters in Computer Science

An engineering student thinks through the case for grad school in America

careerpersonal
5 min read

iPad Changes the Game, Or Does It?

Apple just announced the iPad and the internet cannot decide if it is revolutionary or a giant iPod Touch

personal
7 min read

AWS Keeps Growing: Spot Instances

Amazon introduces Spot Instances and a student tries to wrap his head around cloud economics

cloud
7 min read

The Decade Ends: From Dial-Up to Cloud

Looking back at 2000-2009, a decade that took us from dial-up connections to cloud computing, and changed everything

personalcareer
7 min read

Got My RHCE: What It Means

After months of studying, late nights, and lab rebuilds, I passed the RHCE exam and learned more than just Linux

career
7 min read

VMware vSphere: The Future of Virtualization

VMware renames and reimagines its platform as vSphere 4, and the data center will never be the same

cloud
7 min read

Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere

A new runtime called Node.js puts JavaScript on the server and everything I thought I knew about web architecture shifts

cloud
7 min read

Windows 7 RC: Microsoft Gets It Right

After the Vista disaster, Microsoft releases the Windows 7 Release Candidate and it actually feels good

personal
6 min read

Studying for RHCE

Deep in Red Hat territory, preparing for the RHCE certification and discovering what system administration really means

careercloud
7 min read

What Cloud Computing Actually Means

Everyone is talking about cloud computing and nobody seems to agree on what it means so I tried to figure it out myself

cloud
6 min read

Android Dream: Google's Phone OS

Google made a phone operating system and it is open source and my brain will not stop thinking about the implications

personal
6 min read

Chrome Launches: Browsers Will Never Be the Same

Google released a web browser and it is shockingly fast and I have opinions about this

personal
6 min read

My First Linux Server

I got my hands on a real Linux server and learned more in two weeks than I did in a semester of classes

cloudcareer
5 min read

iPhone 3G and the Mobile Web

Apple just announced the iPhone 3G and I think the way we use the internet is about to fundamentally shift

personalcareer
5 min read

Google App Engine Changes Everything

Google just opened up their infrastructure to regular developers and I cannot stop thinking about it

cloud
4 min read

Why I'm Starting This Blog

A wide-eyed engineering student discovers the internet and decides to document the journey

personalcareer
Blog | AskLokesh