Azedi Technology is my (Kief Morris) site for posting articles and blog entries related to the technology and business of designing, developing, and operating online services and supporting infrastructure. It was originally a corporate site for the limited company I used for a period when I was working freelance, and a place to move work-related stuff off of my personal blog/site.

I am currently the Senior Technical Architect at a company which provides specialised online content for healthcare, specifically for helping healthcare organisations develop and publish evidence-based care pathways for their clinicians to deliver better outcomes to patients effectively and reliably. My opinions do not reflect my employer's policies, and my technology interests are not necessarily related to my employer's strategies or product development roadmap.

My role is largely focused on the software development side at the moment, but I also still have a hand in the infrastructure side of things. I'm not as hands-on at the coding level as I should be at the moment, mainly I try to bridge the technical teams (development and support) with the customers and business people, working out the best way to solve problems and make specific technical changes to our products to do things better.

Some topics I am particularly interested in these days include:

• Devops, which is a new label for the concept of integrating development and infrastructure operations. I see this as closely related to most of the other topics I'm interested in.
• Continuous Delivery, which is about having integrated, consistent, and automated processes for development, testing, and production deployment. Again, this is something I've been involved in throughout my professional career, but I find the book Humble and Farley have written really captures the state of the art. I've been working with Hudson and Maven lately, and started to get into Groovy.
• PaaS clouds. We're currently using IaaS technologies, both private (Eucalyptus, VMWare, and Amazon EC2) to build what amounts to a hybrid PaaS. It seems to me if you take an IaaS service, add infrastructure automation such as Chef, and a continuous delivery pipeline, you've got your own PaaS.
• Lean and agile software development practices, and general business practices which focus on lean, transparency, open book management, and similar concepts
• Spring Framework and related SpringSource products. As I've re-energized my focus on the above trends, especially cloud, I see the Spring ecosystem as having the best fit to the things I need to do, and the way I want to work.

Areas I have been interested in the past, but am a bit less hands-on with these days, include:

• Tomcat and Java application servers in general (although I'm getting back into Tomcat lately).
• Infrastructure management tools, particularly centralized configuration management such as Cfengine and Puppet, as well as monitoring and provisioning. These are more relevant than ever to my current interests, but lately other members of my team have been doing the hands on stuff, using newer tools like Chef.