Announcing a new thing

If you love Black Mirror, you might like this.

Hello Cloud Irregular regulars,

Some of you know that in addition to my day job in cloud and my overly colorful attempts at nonfiction, I’m also an SFWA-qualified science fiction writer. My work tends to focus on the near future, and in particular the uncertain impact of AI and ubiquitous computing on our individual and collective well-being. Basically, Black Mirror-type stuff.

My work up til now has mostly been published in traditional sorts of places; in fact, my recent Abyss & Apex story Russian Rhapsody was just nominated for the 2021 Eugie Foster Award.

But today I’m launching a new fiction project in a new format: a science fiction novel that unfolds as a weekly email newsletter.

Eternity Hacks is both a parody of Peak Newsletter culture and a deep dive into the social eternity: a closer-than-you-think future where anyone can live forever … as long as your idea of “live forever” is “Big Tech simulates you as a chatbot using your lifetime of online activity as training data.”

To be clear, Eternity Hacks will not affect or overlap with Cloud Irregular. The newsletter you are reading right now will continue to be the home for my cloud ramblings, and I will not spam this list with updates about the fiction project. So this is your chance to check out Eternity Hacks and subscribe (it’s free, of course!) at newsletter.eternityhacks.com.

The first two bite-size installments are up now, but this is going to get way stranger than you think.

Links and Events

The good people of NetApp asked me (probably on the strength of this nonsense) to join a collegial debate on serverless vs containers. Somewhere along the way, Bruce Buffer got involved. In the end I got ten minutes to explain why FaaS is dead and serverless is winning anyway. That video contains probably the most concise summary of everything I’ve been trying to say about serverless for the last 5 years.

On Wednesday I’m joining a panel with about 80 combined years of IT experience to roleplay our way through a challenging cloud migration scenario. The twist: you, the audience, will throw technical and organizational wrenches into our wheels as we go along. It should be an entertaining mess at the very least.

And two weeks after that I’m filled with impostor syndrome to be hosting a group of incredible people including Donovan Brown, Jessica Kerr, Kesha Williams, and Matt Stratton to discuss the future of DevOps in the post-COVID world.

Finally, I interviewed Brent Ozar about what’s up these days with Microsoft SQL Server, the most beloved database your startup will never use.

Just For Fun

I recorded this back in 2018 but the recent OVH data center fire story convinced me against my better judgment to bring it out of mothballs. I’m so, so sorry for The Disaster Recovery Song: