The End for ThatBlueCloud

I started thatbluecloud.com as a blog that would focus on Azure-related solution architecture use cases and technologies, to present real world examples that would be solved using real world tech components. It started with data, specifically Microsoft Fabric, then would move on to the application and security side of things. Unfortunately, that journey has come to an end.

There are many reasons behind it: Volatile technologies (Fabric was still beta when I started it), effort required to think things through, careful considerations around IP rights (the automotive example had gone through quite a bit of it), hosting difficulties (Ghost is expensive for a small blog this size, and self hosting was a painful journey, see Death of a Cluster post for details), etc.

But the real reason was Google and AI: In a world where Google crawls the site and trains its AI to give the response, but the traffic won't flow into your own website, what's the point in keeping a blog other than training Google's AI search?

You don't get much credit other than the links on the paragraphs (which isn't very clear) and all you do is prepare free food for the AI to get better at your job. You hide your content behind a paywall to prevent that, but you don't get indexed. If you don't publish your content on a shared platform like Medium or Substack, you rarely get visibility.

I didn't go into this for the money, but I didn't do it because I wanted to share all my knowledge freely with people either. I did it to prove that I can, to have it reinforce my online reputation that I'm a capable solution architect. To build a portfolio that would allow me to share that knowledge, but also build up my name.

If Google and other search engines aren't going to help with that, why would I help them?

So, with a not-so-heavy heart, I stopped blogging some time ago, stopped the website entirely a few weeks ago, and in a week or two it'll be gone entirely.

These days I'm focusing my energy on building apps instead of blogging. I always felt unsettled with the concept of blogging, which is why I don't blog on my own website often. Doing it as a profession is not my cup of coffee (I might be British but I like coffee better).

Long story short, so long, ThatBlueCloud. It was a nice adventure, but it's time for the end.