Let’s talk Mastodon! This won’t be a how-to as there have been plenty of those over the past few weeks, but I wanted to make some observations based on my past experience and how it triggered my nostalgia.

I joined about a week ago (the hachyderm.io instance – an awesome community!) I was very reluctant to join Mastodon at first, because I couldn’t see the value. It felt too complex and segmented, but after a chat on Twitter on the subject I decided to give it a try and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the experience!

What has resonated with me since I joined was how much it reminded me of what I consider the golden age of the Internet, which for me is the pre-social media era.

I’ve been hearing about the eminent demise of on-premise workloads and “Private Clouds” ever since the Public Cloud became a thing. Most recently I’ve seen quite a few articles about how their days are numbered.

I disagree.

In my role as a Product Architect for Microsoft Hyper-V and Cloud Platform my team and I deal with traditional Virtualization but we also dabble quite a bit in Public Clouds, mostly Microsoft Azure. We try and make sure we utilize every service that we can to provide a streamlined product offering for our customers. So, I live in these worlds and often advise customers and architect environments that take advantage of both worlds. I’ll be speaking primarily from the Microsoft side of things.

First off private clouds still provide significant value and lower your overall IT spend. Your benefits include being able to fully manage your entire stack from the networking on up. You’re in control of the compliance and how everything operates. There are still quite a few reasons to use traditional virtualization for things like legacy workloads and most of all control. You also have full access to all the capacity you purchased up front, and when you aren’t using that capacity it’s available to you right away. It certainly is not hyperscale, but it is guaranteed capacity within your data center.

Public clouds are advancing at a rapid pace, in some cases new features are added hourly. They are starting to become MUCH friendlier to compliance requirements like PCI, FedRAMP and many others. And as a result, it is becoming more appealing to put your workload in Azure or AWS.

Recently I got into an argument in some Facebook comments (yea I know) regarding Online Communities. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently with everything going on in this country.

It’s the Internet. You get a group of people together under a shroud of anonymity and guess what happens? Stupidity that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

I’ve been involved in a variety of online communities and I’ve even been at the helm of a few. I know that they can be fickle beasts with all sorts of crazy personalities, trolls, and debate. It can be very easy to shrug off comments or threats made by someone on the Internet “It’s the Internet. You get a group of people together under a shroud of anonymity and guess what happens? Stupidity that shouldn’t be taken seriously.” but having been the target of online harassment over the years I can tell you that it isn’t anything that should be shrugged off. I’ve even seen toxic people be celebrated and rewarded time and time again when they do nothing but blurt out vitriol and racism. I’ve seen those same people bring other people in to their cause and have those people do the harassment for them, its the modern day version of a henchman.

I say that it should be taken very seriously for a number of reasons.

If you aren’t an Engineer or don’t work in the tech industry the term “Net Neutrality” may not mean a whole lot to you. So I’ll start with a brief explanation of exactly what it is and why you should care about it.

Net neutrality for all intents and purposes is a means to ensure that the Internet is treated as a Utility. So what does that mean to you exactly?

Imagine if the electric company decided that they would reduce the voltage provided to your house. Instead of getting the promised 110v you were now getting 90v. Likely, this means that most of your appliances wouldn’t work and the things that did would would be unreliable at best. Net Neutrality makes sure that the same thing doesn’t happen with your Internet. Meaning that, say you were watching too much Netflix and the provider didn’t like that — They could simply “throttle” it and make it so your Netflix would be unreliable and constantly buffering. Funny enough, that actually happened.

The government has already made strides to insure that the Internet is treated as a utility, meaning that theoretically the above scenario isn’t possible anymore.

Or is it?