Pearson

In 2012, Pearson's CIO Aref gave a simple directive: "Take us to the cloud." I was a software architect tasked with figuring out how to deploy MongoDB in AWS. What started as solving a single deployment problem became something much bigger.

The existing process was manual and slow—infrastructure provisioning took months. Every deployment was a custom snowflake. I started writing a Python utility called "awsdeploy" to automate the work. The first commit was August 18, 2012.

By December, what had been a simple deployment script had evolved into a full platform. I named it Nibiru—after the mythological planet. This was where I first learned how to wield AWS, and it shaped everything that came after.

Nibiru wasn't just deployment automation—it was a complete platform for managing cloud infrastructure. The philosophy was radical for the time: give developers what they need, enforce operational best practices through automation, and make the platform do the heavy lifting.

One of the key innovations was the naming convention. Every piece of infrastructure followed a predictable pattern like use1a-pri-mongodb-s1-01—region, environment, service, shard, instance. This made the infrastructure self-documenting and enabled automation at every level.

In January 2013, Gene Kim's "The Phoenix Project" launched. Shortly after, Pearson's senior leadership brought him in for a three-day consulting engagement. He walked through the organization's pain points—technical debt, dev and ops collaboration, the importance of version controlling production artifacts.

At the time, I didn't realize that what we were building with Nibiru was DevOps. I just thought the cloud itself was enabling us to do things faster. Gene's engagement gave me the vocabulary to understand what we were actually doing—and why it mattered.

Nibiru embodied a philosophy that I've carried through every engagement since: give developers what they need, but enforce operational best practices through the platform itself. Developers got root access—but Puppet enforced state. They could deploy anything—but the platform handled the how.

This wasn't just about technology. I introduced colleagues to the concepts of DevOps and cloud architecture—people who would go on to lead their own transformations. A decade later, one of those connections led me to the Gilead engagement, where I'd apply everything I'd learned at scale.