Welcome

Learning technologies, putting them together and troubleshooting the inevitable problems has been both a career and hobby for me. Since everyday brings something new … it never ends.

These topics include Electronics, Computers, Databases, Network Technologies, Massively Parallel Databases, Analytics, Data Engineering, Data Science, Cloud technologies, Data Warehousing, Streaming data, Virtualization, Container technology, Orchestration, Pipelines, GPUs, Quantum Computing, DevOps, GitOps, Internet of Things, Mobile, Web Services, REST, Microservices, Observability, Monitoring and more.

One point I find interesting is that I started with an interest in electronics which evolved to computers, databases and analytics into streaming technologies. Now by virtue of miniaturized sensors, Raspberry Pi’s, Arduinos, edge computing and the like I’ve come full cycle.

In my career, I moved from topic to topic. Numerous cycles with deep iterations through each cycle, prevented a broad and thin experience to insure a broad and deep experience. No doubt, by the time I would cycle back to a previous topic, there was a new set of details, and occasionally, a new disruptive technology. Some technologies I pursued over many years, some I dismissed. This was always influenced by customers and markets and potential which helped to focus on longer term trends.

You might say that a lack of focus led me to declare myself a Software, Systems, and Solutions Architect depending on the call of the day. Taking a lot of technologies – putting them together. However, I always and continue to dive into the details for the components to make sure I see and talk about the forest AND the trees.

These are themes I’ll try and carry through in this site.

The initial subsites include:

• Big Data and Cloud Databases
• Analytics
• GPU Analytics
• IoT and Real-Time Analytics
• Data and Machine Learning Pipelines

I’ll work on showing practical methods for putting these together, mixed with education and help on solving real problems, end-to-end. In keeping with the times I’ll show this in the new world of containers, clouds, DevOps, MLOps, and GitOps.

One exciting theme is to show how you can participate in these operations by moving from micro-controllers to laptop to the cloud infrastructure. A new intermediate step I’ll address is building a low-cost intermediate step with micro-controllers that can be made more powerful than a laptop and much cheaper than the cloud.

The latest Raspberry Pis are 64 bit, dual core with 8GB. You can install 64 bit Linux, cluster nodes together, add GPUs and create relatively powerful clusters. These can run distributed software – including Kubernetes and Docker to participate in the operations flow. This and related technologies occupy the edge of a distributed, communications-enabled world.

With a new love and respect for Kubernetes, I will explore many of these technologies by making it easy to move from local to edge to cloud. Showing you how you can explore cloud level technologies without cloud level prices.

I also love and respect both the integration and automation aspects of pipelines for both infrastructure and systems. Make a change and carry it through development, test, staging, and deployment.

Initially there are some non-kubernetes efforts, but I will try and move everything into the realm of containers and orchestration. These tools help grease that flow from local to edge to cloud, makes it easy to mix on-premises with cloud and easier to move from one cloud to another. As in the real-world, I’ll come back to older topics with newer twists to keep things moving forward. Also, initially there will be manual, step by step exercises that later will be fully automated. This is a learning experience for me and hopefully you as well.