Working on our Private Cloud project this week…

This week I am in San Jose working on a very cool project. The US IT Evangelist team has been building a REAL Private Cloud that we can use for training, testing, and showing our customers how it all works in the real world. Usually, when we deliver presentations to a live audience or during a webcast, we are limited to what we can show using our laptops. Some of us have invested in home labs to help extend our demos, but even that doesn’t let us mimic a true production environment effectively. For this project, we acquired some budget to purchase some “big iron” which is being housed with a hosting provider. We are going on site in waves to build out, document, and troubleshoot our private cloud implementation. In each wave we are tearing it all down, then taking the documentation created from the previous wave to re-build from scratch. This allows all of us to provide quality assurance checks against the configuration and get our hands dirty.

For me, this is particularly exciting! I have been a computer geek all of my life, but until coming to work for Microsoft, I never actually worked in the industry. I have been in datacenters before, but I have never been the guy that built servers, installed the software, and implemented the designs. Now, I finally get to be a part of a team that is doing just that!

Today is Day 1 and we have until Thursday to wrap it all up. I am picking up my co-worker, Brian Lewis, this afternoon and will have Matt Hester and Blain Barton working from remote. I picked up a case of Red Bull for inspiration and I have mapped out the locations of the local Krispy Cremes when the Red Bull isn’t enough to keep us energized!  Keep and eye on the blog and on my Twitter for periodic live updates!

Cheers!