About James Devine

My name is James Devine and I’m a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS. I have a deep passion for technology. I love diving in deep, learning everything I can, and then making that knowledge digestible for the masses – be it techies and c-suites alike. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a deep hands on background combined with many hundreds of customer interactions in my roles as a Solutions Architect.

My career has largely followed my interests, which thankfully have aligned nicely with enterprise industry trends. I’d like to say it’s been more deliberate, but honestly just following my passions has not let me down thus far.

When I first discovered x86 virtualization I was hooked. At first this was tinkering away as a hobby running multiple VMs on a way underpowered machine. The desktop virtualization experience then lent itself to server virtualization. This meant deeply learning storage, compute, and networking. I found myself in an intern position at MITRE with a VMware cluster that was in shambles and on ESX version 2.0. Fortunately it was pretty easy to start optimizing and eventually upgrade. All this VMware work eventually scored me a ticket to VMworld (and many more there after).

My core set of skills continued to develop as I worked on many projects. Replicating VMs over SATCOM, strapping VMware servers to military vehicles in the middle of the desert, and building huge VMware clusters. One thing that stood out for me was that I really enjoyed networking the most and that become one of my primary focuses. That lead me to supporting new infrastructure projects and getting hands on with Cisco Nexus gear, EMC, NetApp, Palo Alto, Juniper, and other vendor gear.

Around this same time the whole “cloud” thing began to take off. That became a new passion. How do I connect all this expensive on-premises stuff to the cloud (and why)? Getting hands on I was able to get up to speed on AWS fairly quickly, although there was 1000% less services at the time. This experience and understanding shifted my focus to new projects there were mainly cloud-based. It was exciting being at the forefront and working with customers that at the time didn’t even know what cloud was nor see the value. The old-school “is cloud secure” was the question of the day all the time. Fortunately that ship has long sailed and folks know they can be more secure in the cloud.

By this point my resume said all the right alphabet soup buzzwords it needed to with cloud, on-premises, and throw in DevOps for good measure. It finally peaked the interest of AWS and I was offered a job. I had a great 4-year stint of literally traveling the world supporting global customers. All the while I was able to build quite a repository of webinars, blogs, tech talks, and whitepapers. I was able to learn a huge amount and become a global SME in AWS networking.

Looking for a change and the chance to work at a startup, I joined Aviatrix. It’s be amazing to still get to help AWS customers solve challenging networking problems and work with the industry networking experts from each of the Cloud Service Providers. It’s clear that cloud is here to say. The question now is not if cloud, it’s how many clouds and how do we connect them together. While I was only there a year, it was a rewarding experience to lead product as VP and help move the platform in a new direction. I was able to increase both the status and product effectiveness.

I have a B.S. in Computer Science from Allegheny College and M.S. in Computer Science from Stevens Institute. I created this website to showcase my interest, hobbies, and projects that I am working on. The website started out in College with the name “The Adventures of an Undergraduate Computer Scientist” and I changed the name to “The Adventure of an Infrastructure Engineer” after I graduated and started digging into infrastructure as a full-time job at MITRE. It then changed yet again to “The Adventures of a Principal Solutions Architect” (dusting it off after a several year hiatus and a VM crash) and now its current iteration is “Adventures in the Cloud.”