Week 1 Blog Entry - Introduction

Greetings Cloud Computing World!
     My Name is Jered Vest and I am a Weather Forecaster in the United States Air Force.  I have been serving for 10 years after enlisting in 2009.  I begun my career as a Client Systems Technician here I was responsible for primarily fixing desktop computers and troubleshooting Help Desk tickets.  This is where my interest in the IT Industry really took off.  Unfortunately, 4 years into my career I was forced to retrain into a new career field and I ended up choosing Weather Forecasting.  Believe it or not, Forecasting has introduced me to a new world of IT based hardware and software and has given me a whole new perspective.  Currently, my primary job is to perform Operational Tests on software that is developed for the weather forecaster community.  One in particular is a piece of software that is responsible for all of the data that is ingested and disseminated from a supercomputer.  I must test this software to ensure that all data is routed correctly and that the end users are receiving it correctly.  This has opened my eyes to hardware refreshes, storage arrays, controllers, and the sheer mass of data that is flooded across the globe on a daily basis.

      More particularly to this blog, I have recently been exposed to the future of the Air Force.  Cloud Computing.  It is in the interests of the DoD to begin to outsource their storage to the industry leader in the Cloud.  Amazon.  This will be the direction that the Air Force Weather industry is moving where all of their data will be hosted in the Cloud for the hope that it is more cost effective than maintaining their own hardware, and faster to access by the end user.  This field interests me as I do not have the most experience with how the Cloud actually works, other than it is a faster and easier place to store your data for access virtually anywhere.

      I look forward to this journey over the next 12 weeks and hope to learn and reveal any interesting bits of information I may glean from my learning.

Until next time friends!

Jered Vest