Last year I wrote about parting ways with the OpenNMS Project and how I was ready for “Act III” of my professional career.

With my future being somewhat of a tabula rasa, I was a bit overwhelmed with choices, so I decided to return to my roots and dust off my consulting LLC. Soon I found myself in the financial sector helping to deploy network monitoring and observability solutions.

I was working with some pretty impressive applications and it was interesting to see the state of the art for monitoring. We’ve come a long way since SNMP. It was engaging and fun work, but all the software was proprietary and I missed the open source aspect.

Recently, Spot Callaway made me aware of an opportunity at Amazon Web Services for an open source evangelist position. Of all the things I’ve done in my career, acting as an evangelist for open source solutions was my favorite thing to do and here was a chance to do it full time. I will admit that Amazon was not the first name that popped into my head when I think “open source” but as I got to learn more about the team and AWS’s open source initiatives, the more interested I became in the position. After I made it through their rather intense interview process and met even more people with whom I’ll be working, it became a job I couldn’t refuse.

So I’m happy to announce that I’m now a Principal Evangelist at AWS, reporting to David Nalley, who, in addition to being a pretty awesome boss is also the current President of the Apache Software Foundation. OpenNMS would not have existed without software from the ASF, and it will be cool to learn, in addition, more about that organization first hand.

My main role will be to work with open source companies as an advocate for them within AWS. The solutions AWS provides can help jumpstart these companies toward profitability by providing the resources they need to be successful and to affordably grow as their needs change. While I am just getting started within the organization and it will take me some time to learn the ropes, I am hoping my own experience in running an open source business will provide a unique insight into issues faced by those companies.

Exciting times, so watch this space as my open source adventures continue.