The Big Switch
June 10, 2008
One of the cooler moments in my life was when Nick Carr’s publisher sent me an advance copy of The Big Switch, Nick’s book on the future of computing as a utility. Little did I know at the time that a long standing love of all things computing, and my increasing passion for distributed, web scale computing, would collide with my own career path. Not this soon any way.
As some of you are aware this is my last week in my current job. Later this month I will be starting a new position in the business development group at Amazon Web Services, where I will jump headfirst into the world of web services and utility computing. Many eons ago, I promised myself, never to take up a job where I didn’t believe in the underlying fundamentals and that has been the case throughout my career. Any reader of this blog is more than aware of my belief in the impact of cloud computing in general and Amazon’s web services stack and business model in particular. It’s an opportunity that I just could not resist, even though it takes me out of being directly involved with science in one way or another for the first time since 1989 when I decided to choose science as my specialty in high school. Hopefully along the way, I’ll get to play some role in the adoption of the cloud for scientific computing.
What does this mean for bbgm? To be quite honest, I am not 100% sure, but do have some ideas. Obviously the disclaimers will change. In some ways it also makes it easier to blog about science. There have been many occasions where an in depth analysis was not feasible due to potential conflicts of interest, or where I had access to privileged information. That’s no longer an issue now, so I hope to be able to blog more freely about science, perhaps even starting that industry watch column I have always wanted to. I won’t have access to all the newsletters and journals as before (will really miss BioInform), so I will be following blogs a little more closely :). One hope is that being around developers and the freedom to do some garage science without conflict with my day job will get be coding actively and participating in BioGang projects. Otherwise, it’s still the good ole bbgm. Computing, in silico science, the Semantic Web, Open Data, Personalized Medicine, and Bursty Work are all going to remain staples. I suspect time is going to be a big issue, so will have to become more efficient or so I suspect. We’ll see.
And here is the cool footnote. While not quite Second Life, this whole chain of events started unfolding on Twitter, including sending a resume in 140 characters or less.
Technorati Tags: Amazon Web Services
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Computing, Self, Software & Internet
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Thank you very much. That's my hope as well :)
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Best wishes from an AWS Evangelist :-)
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