Once more into the cloud

So it’s been a really long time since I last posted. (Life can get quite interesting!)

Quick analogy: I tried about 5 times to read War and Peace. Biggest stumbling block was the names (sometimes people are referred by their names and sometimes by there titles. Oh, and they’re titles change!). So it took fits and starts over probably 10 years before I got my bearings and plowed through it. That, to me, is what it was like to get into the serverless, asynchronous, non-relational data-structured, nebulously-cost-structured paradigm of cloud computing.

And so, I will be spending most of the foreseable thread of posts covering my experiences in my continuing effort to get my (code/head) into the cloud. I hope it will be of some value to others, both in specific posts as well as its ongoing context.

Wait, where’s the box?

I’ve been a web application for over 20 years now, but it’s all been hosted either under my desk, (don’t laugh, none of us knew what we were doing in 1996) or in a “computer closet” or like many of us over the past 19 or so years some kind of server room/data center. Either way it, it involved metal boxes that were wired together, on-prem and managed by people who were on-prem and run by Sys Admins and DBAs who were on-prem, etc….

Well, so much for those days.

Hello World, Goodbye Box

So our first stop is to actually put something in the cloud. In our case, it will be a simple web “server” (just a script really) that will run for us without us having to set up IIS/apache, ftp, etc…

This is a live, working cloud service! I encourage you to dive in and kick the tires. Click the green “play” button at the top. Change some of the code. Then click it again. And see what happens. Note that the results show in the lower left corner which is actually a regular browser iframe which called our script and displayed the resulting string/file.

Next up will be a brief discussion on what this is and isn’t.