I just started re-reading Start With Why by Simon Sinek, which is a fantastic book on leadership and business strategy. The book’s core argument is that great companies don’t focus on what they do or offer, or how they do it. Instead, they focus on their WHY, their story, and what they stand for.

I woke up this morning, sleep deprived after my cat woke me up repeatedly last night and discovered I needed to write something about writing. Perhaps it's because I'm reading "Bird by bird" again by Anne Lamott. So here is another post about writing as a software engineer.

I love writing, I love the feel of knowing there's a seed of a story or an idea inside. With some writing projects I know something is there worth telling, but I don't always know enough about it yet to be sure. Sometimes it requires upfront research and sometimes I think I know enough to start writing and see the idea emerge as I type. The piece advances, in fits and starts, as I go back and research gaps, and often discarding the whole thing and rewriting it again... until it has formed itself into something worth while. Then I send it to people for review and I get more ideas and insights making the piece better again.

My job at Confluent involves a mixture of research, engineering and helping us figure out the best technical strategy to follow. BYOC is something I’ve been thinking about recently so I decided to write down the thoughts I have on it and where I think cloud services are going in general.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a deployment model which sits somewhere between a SaaS cloud service and an on-premise deployment. The vendor deploys their software in a VPC in the customer account but manages most of the administration for the customer. It’s not a new idea, the term Managed Service Provider (MSP) has been around since the 90s, and refers to the general term of outsourcing management and operations of IT infrastructure deployed within customer or third-party data centers.