Work

Google announcement regarding egress fees:

Starting today, Google Cloud customers who wish to stop using Google Cloud and migrate their data to another cloud provider and/or on premises, can take advantage of free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud. This applies to all customers globally. Source: Eliminating data transfer fees when migrating off Google Cloud | Google Cloud Blog

This is major. I often see clients forget to consider the exit costs of any hyper-scaler in the TCO calculation. Getting into the cloud isn’t cheap. And up until today, getting out of the cloud wasn’t either. Now, for those on GCP, it is. I expect the others (looking at you, AWS, and Azure) to follow, maybe not this year, but they will, either by their choice or they will be forced. This is an anti-competitive measure to charge for egress fees.

Someone at work sent me a text to get feedback. After reading it, I had this vague impression that ChatGPT was involved in the process. Out of curiosity, I openly asked the author if it was the case. And sure enough, the answer was yes. 8 out of 10 times, the outcome is the same when I ask that question. Gen AI usage is becoming pervasive in my world at work. Is it the same for you?

Scrolling through my LinkedIn timeline today. It always gives me weird feelings when I see people I work with announcing their retirement. These posts are reminders that, eventually, everyone will cross that gate. Me included. 😔

Monday. A new work week begins. To celebrate, I created a new category for my work-related posts (RSS feed). I plan to share more about my work life in 2024 and beyond. 👨🏻‍💻

Introspection time: I chose to be in IT because I thought it was much easier to deal with computers than humans. I’m not an introvert, though, far from it. But, it happened without explicit thought back in the day. After 30 years in IT, I still think the same, and I often say that the challenge in the information technology field is not about technology per se, but it’s mostly about human issues with technology. Ironically, most of my job today is to build teams of people to make things happen. I’m still focused on technology, but in reality, I try to ensure that all members of a team work towards the same objectives. I’m pretty good about it and people are appreciative of my work. How ironic.

Going back to work tomorrow after a two-week break that was much needed. Now, I know what’s awaiting me tomorrow. It’s a fuckin busy agenda. 😳 I refrained all weekend from connecting to my office email. Sure, I could have done a pre-cleanup and say: ok, it’s not that bad. But I didn’t do it. Why? Because my mailbox would have been cleaner, yeah, but not my mental charge, would have been 🤯. It was a good decision to stay partly innocent. ☝🏻