About This Site

This site was built because I primarily wanted to share some of my findings exploring some deep concepts of cloud computing with the world.

I figured, if I found something frustrating, spent days researching the issue, and then found a solution… Perhaps I can spare the next engineer the pain.

The single largest reason I never made a site was security – I don’t want to maintain this page on a daily, weekly, or even a monthly basis. Thankfully static site generators like Hugo solved that. I had a tiny bit of free time over the holiday break to investigate the setup, and here it is! This site is backed by Github with connections to AWS SNS, Lambda, S3, and CloudFront. It’s not as pretty as WordPress, but it saves hours a year on maintenance and the domain fee is by far the single largest cost.

My skill set focuses primarily on supporting “serverless” applications – primarily meaning a focus on AWS Lambda or Docker containers as where most of the code executes, as well as the supporting services (EC2, ECS, API Gateway, CloudFront, S3, DynamoDB). I also have experience moving code from servers to containers, as well as traditional IT infrastructure and tools (Load balancing, SQL servers).

I’m happy to discuss and/or contract for AWS Solutions for your personal or business needs. If you’re working at a higher education institution, I’ll provide a few (< ~3) hours of general advice for free* if it is for the benefit of research, or directly benefiting your school mission. Connect with me on LinkedIn or by e-mail at ldoughty (at vt.edu).

*=Free comes with a catch, this would obviously be guidance without any guarantee or liability, just a helping hand. Though, I wouldn’t turn down a drink if you’re in the area!