My name is Bill Cawthra and I am currently a Cloud Infrastructure Architect. I play with little fluffy clouds all day. I deploy everything from serverless Lambda infrastructure, to Kubernetes, to good ol' fashion EC2 instances (or Google Cloud VMs, or Azure Virtual Machines). I manage multiple projects, across multiple AWS organizations and multiple AWS accounts. Serving as lead architect for the CPI and MISI cloud infrastructures, I manage multiple projects within multiple AWS accounts. I help design, deploy, manage, and automate all aspects of infrastructure and operations for whatever the business need requires. Primary automation tools include Terraform and Ansible. All projects and all infrastructure are built as infrastructure as code via Git or GitHub. Infrastructure deployment and management is automated, again, using Terraform and Ansible. Vim is my IDE of choice, I work from the terminal almost all the time.

Historically, I’ve done all sorts of various IT things, like system administration, system engineering, security engineering, and DevOps. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of infrastructure work around deploying blockchain solutions, from private blockchain technologies (Intel Hyperledger Sawtooth), to NEO, to the classic Bitcoin. I like to build fun stuff.

My first computer was an Apple IIe. That thing was awesome. My next real computer was an old CAD workstation, a 486DX Gateway PC with 40 MB of RAM, which was ridiculous at the time. I worked as a system administrator since attending the Pennsylvania State University and working part time as a junior sys admin. That’s really where I became a technologist. All my life I’ve been playing around with and building stuff in the computer/Internet/tech world. I grew up watching the Internet and technology grow right before me - it was an unbelievable thing to see. We didn’t even have call waiting growing up and we had ONLY a wired phone with pulse dialing… Then all of a sudden the Internet happened and now we have smart phones that are more powerful than my first laptop, able to access the Internet anywhere. Blew my freaking mind. I grew up on both sides of that fence and remember what it was BEFORE the Internet and now after. I see similarities between the rise of the Internet and the rise of blockchain and wonder where this will go…

After graduating with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (right after the crash of the dot-com bubble), I started off as a Windows System Administrator. I managed a relatively small Windows 2000 Active Directory Domain. Fun times where I really cut my teeth on all aspects of technology and troubleshooting technical problems.

I was lucky enough to then get an opportunity to work down in the Maryland/D.C. area, where I really got my hands on Linux and especially computer security. I was lucky enough to work with some amazing people in amazing areas of infosec. I started to discover security tools, like NMAP, tcpdump (my #1 debugging tool ;) ;) ;) ), Snort, Suricata, OSSEC, Alienvault, Metasploit, ettercap, and all those other fun tools in Kali Linux.

But security wasn’t my exclusive passion. I used it a lot and have always tried to make it a priority, but what I really liked was building infrastructure. I was lucky enough to get involved in projects that involved AWS and startups that focused on automation tools.

And now I’m here, in the greater Charleston area. I love to build and automate infrastructure. Currently I am a huge fan of Terraform Ansible, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Kubernetes. I work with GitHub, Terraform, and Ansible as my core toolset of choice. ZSH + Vim is where I spend most of my IDE time. I’m hoping to use this page to document what tools I’ve worked with and any interesting tidbits I find and as a reference for myself.

My reason for creating this site is simple: to document and publish any cool ideas of what I build or discover. At the very least it will be a good resource for myself. If others find it interesting, all the more awesome. Cheers.

You can reach me via email or LinkedIn.

(Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.)