Joseph Wright has been working in the industry since 2005. Before becoming a professional, he spent years hooked on the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems as a hobby.
Joseph created his first EC2 instance in 2006 as soon as he saw the EC2 announcement from Amazon. Back then, the AWS CLI was an executable jar and clumsy to use, but a magical thing happened the moment he logged into that first instance. A virtual machine had been created in seconds and as soon as it was stopped, it cost nothing. He poked around in the machine for a few minutes and then shut it down, and it cost only $0.10! At the time, he was an employee of a traditional VPS hosting provider, and he saw the writing on the wall. Computing infrastructure was about to become fully programmable and accessible at your fingertips in a way that was not possible before. That was when he knew he was not just hooked on operating systems but also “the cloud”.
Joseph spent many hours honing his skills in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and wherever he worked, he became the to go-to guy on the topic. He noticed that most of the available material on learning IaC was based on specific tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform, rather than on an architecture. As he became more seasoned in the art of IaC, his code began to follow certain patterns that were independent of the tool he was using. He invented a model to provide a vocabulary to describe these patterns and establish a much needed architecture. Drawing on his years of experience and the architecture he developed, Joseph has helped many companies run effectively in the cloud, from small startups to Fortune 500 giants.