Tag: VMware

A journey across scales: national (CNB), global (PIMCO & Monster Energy), and worldwide (The Church).

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Every IT career tells a story, and mine has moved through three different scales of impact:

Company-Level Foundations → At PayForward, I migrated an entire OnPrem environment into AWS. That meant setting up VPCs, building HA Exchange clusters with load balancers, and proving the power of cloud for a fast-moving startup.

Regional / Global Scale → At Monster Energy and PIMCO, the work stretched across North America, EMEA, and APAC. The systems never slept. VMware clusters and M365 tenants had to function as one, even though users were scattered across time zones and continents.

Worldwide Reach → At the Church, the scale expanded beyond regions. Over 200,000 employees and over 80,000 missionaries, connected by systems that had to reach every corner of the globe, demanded both technical precision and spiritual responsibility.

This journey shows that the “cloud above us” isn’t just AWS, Azure, or GCP — it’s the ability to design, secure, and sustain systems at every possible scale.

A colleague once told me: “Automate, or eliminate.” In IT, that isn’t just a clever saying — it’s survival. At the scale of hundreds or even thousands of VMs, EC2 instances, or mailboxes, doing things manually is not just unrealistic — it’s risky. What automation can finish in under 10 minutes might take days or weeks by hand, and even then would be prone to errors.

That’s why Python, PowerShell, Bash, and automation frameworks became part of my daily toolkit. Not to flaunt, but because without automation, no single engineer could handle the demands of environments as large as PIMCO, Monster Energy, or the Church.

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Snippet 1: AWS (My PayForward Days)

import boto3

# Connect to AWS S3
s3 = boto3.client('s3')

# List buckets
buckets = s3.list_buckets()
print("Your AWS buckets:")
for bucket in buckets['Buckets']:
    print(f"  {bucket['Name']}")

From racks of servers to a few lines of Python—that’s the power of AWS.

Snippet 2: PowerShell + Azure (My Church Years, CNB)

Connect-AzAccount
Get-AzResourceGroup | Select ResourceGroupName, Location

One line, and you can see every Azure resource group spread across the world. A task that once required data center visits and clipboards is now just a command away.

Snippet 3: PHP + GCP (Expanding Horizons)

use Google\Cloud\Storage\StorageClient;

$storage = new StorageClient([
    'keyFilePath' => 'my-service-account.json'
]);

$buckets = $storage->buckets();

foreach ($buckets as $bucket) {
    echo $bucket->name() . PHP_EOL;
}

Snippet 4: VMware + M365 (Monster Energy, PIMCO, and Beyond)

# Connect to vCenter and list VMs across data centers
Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter.global.company.com -User admin -Password pass
Get-VM | Select Name, PowerState, VMHost, Folder

# Quick check of licensed users in M365 (global tenants)
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "User.Read.All"
Get-MgUser -All -Property DisplayName, UserPrincipalName, UsageLocation |
    Group-Object UsageLocation |
    Select Name, Count

One script, and suddenly you’re seeing footprints of users spread across the globe — NA, EMEA, APAC, or even worldwide. That’s the reality of modern IT infrastructure.

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The “cloud above us” is both a literal technology — AWS, Azure, and GCP that I’ve worked across — and a metaphor. It represents resilience, scalability, and unseen support. Just as automation carries workloads we could never handle by hand, life has storms we cannot carry alone.

From startups making their first move to the cloud, to global financial institutions, to worldwide organizations with hundreds of thousands of users, the lesson is the same: we are not meant to fight every battle manually.

We are given tools, teammates, and even unseen strength from above to keep moving forward. The same way a script can manage thousands of servers or accounts without error, trust and preparation help us navigate the storms of life with less fear.

☁️ Above every storm, there’s always a cloud carrying potential. And above that cloud, always light waiting to break through.

Before my cloud journey, I also spent nine years in forensic IT supporting law enforcement — a grounding reminder that technology isn’t only about systems and scale, but about accountability and truth.

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