Shemot - 2025

Chevre, this week’s parsha is Shemot (שְׁמוֹת֙). We start the book of Exodus or Shemot (Names). The book starts with a list of names of the tribes or families who were in Egypt. It has been noted by others several times this week that having a list of names is very much in this week’s news with the hostage deal being discussed. May all our hostages come home soon (including Hadar Goldin or Oron Shaul).

The cloud world has lists as well. My first thought goes to S3 inventories, where a list of all objects is pushed as data into another S3 bucket and that can be queried via Athena. And now there are even tablet buckets and metadata available after data ingestion.

We have the story of Pharoah trying to reduce the Jewish population by having all males born killed. Moshe being saved, him saving a Jew and then running away to Midyan. There he meets Yitro and marries one of his daughters. While Moshe is out tending the flocks, he encounters the burning bush.

The burning bush makes me think about S3 objects with versioning enabled. When an object is deleted, it’s not actually deleted right away, but a delete marker is placed on the object. Eventually, the object will be deleted and it’s a good idea to have a Lifecycle policy to delete those objects more quickly. But essentially, the object is deleted, but not consumed.

Ziporah, Moshe’s wife, circumsizes their son. Moshe and Aaron go meet Pharoah. Pharoah increases the burden on the Jews and the parsha ends with the Jews complaining that things are harder now.

When migrating to the cloud, it can often be that the work required increases. There is a learning curve to getting on the cloud and some applications or workloads need to be modified to work more efficiently on the cloud. In the end, however, the automations and scalability in the cloud reduce work and overhead. And this reduction in day to day operations and maintenance translates into more time and ability to expand and grow in other areas.

A personal example is my website, it took me a good couple of weeks to get the flow working properly for the weekly updates. But now, it takes a min or less for me to take the output of my thoughts and get them up on my website. This gives me more time to formulate my thoughts.

May we all realize the long term benefits of what we do day in and day out. Shabbat Shalom.