In case you don’t know, the cloud is a data center.  Blaine Berger misses the opportunity to answer that key question for the billions of mobile users with this book, but he does speak to much more than arcane data centers.  This is a primer for any budding project manager.  In only 160 pages.  Everyone I work with, and the other 400,000 IBMers I’ve yet to virtually meet on a conference call, should read this book.

If we can substitute the term cloud for data center, and we can, Blaine references his experiences sailing through perfect storms.  Because I grew up in data centers, and should have been fired for numerous large scale outages, each story made me anxious.  I found myself wanting a bigger boat before Blaine would get too far into the details of each data center move.

Fortunately, Blaine applied effective humor to calm my nerves.  I wouldn’t say he used repetition per se, but his lessons built on themselves to where I definitely felt more wise by the end.  Everyone who works in I/T knows computers don’t work and that Murphy’s Law is simply a warmup for dealing with the complexities of installing networks.  This book advises you on how to be prepared.  It’s boy scout meets geek.

I attended Blaine’s book publishing party last night at the Lola Mexican Fish House.  It allowed me to network a little, which I rarely do.  Although I eventually ended up ensconced at a table with four retired IBMers.  Go figure.  As Blaine spoke to the crowd to thank everyone, he began by stating, “We are all authors now.”  The self-centered person I am, I took this as a personal dig toward my blogging.  But then I learned he’s been saying this for awhile and has written several other tech books.  And with scores of others in the room, it is possible he wasn’t merely talking to me.

I left the fish house for another restaurant, because I wanted to explore the Union Station area of Denver before going home.  I ate a small plate of lamb tartare at Colt & Gray with a glass of Coté du Rhone, while swarms of runners buzzed past.  Apparently no one runs alone in LoDo, they all belong to huge teams.  I did miss my evening run for this book affair, but it was worth it.  I took an Uber home after a 3 minute wait.  Enjoyable evening.