Background
I’m a cloud architect based in Texas with more than 20 years in enterprise IT, much of that time at IBM working across cloud transformation, migration, and modernization.
My career started as a Windows NT administrator, on a pager rotation, keeping servers running at 2 a.m. From there, I moved through server consolidation, data center relocations, infrastructure transformation, and eventually into architecture — leading migration and modernization engagements across banking, energy, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and government.
Over the years, I’ve worked on everything from SAP and enterprise application migrations to cloud landing zones, large-scale data center exits, global infrastructure relocations, and resiliency assessments for critical systems. My experience spans both Azure and AWS, although Azure has historically been the larger part of my cloud work.
I hold certifications across AWS and Azure, along with IBM’s Consultant Profession Certification at the Expert level, and I have a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin.
More recently, I’ve been spending a growing amount of time exploring artificial intelligence and how it can be applied to real technical problems. That includes building RAG pipelines, experimenting with local language models and agentic workflows, developing AI-assisted document tooling, and looking for practical ways AI can support cloud migration, modernization, and architecture work.
Professional Focus
My day job is cloud migration and architecture — helping organizations move, modernize, and rationalize applications and infrastructure without losing their footing along the way.
That means working across discovery and assessment, landing zones, migration strategy, architecture and design, modernization decisions, and the unglamorous but critical work of making sure a migration plan actually survives contact with a real environment.
I’m particularly interested in the space between high-level architecture and actual execution: how organizations turn strategy into something that can realistically be built, migrated, operated, and supported.
What I’m Building
Outside of client work, peraleslab.com is where I document the things I’m building, testing, learning, and thinking about.
Some of it comes directly from my professional experience. Some of it comes from my home lab. And some of it is simply experimentation with technologies that interest me.
The goal is for the site to be grounded in real work rather than theory. When I write about a tool, architecture pattern, migration approach, or AI experiment, I generally want there to be something I have actually built, tested, or worked through behind it.
peraleslab.com itself is part of that process. The infrastructure, deployment pipelines, home lab services, and supporting systems are all things I expect to evolve over time — and many of those changes will become part of the site. You’ll find all of this organized by topic in the nav above — from build logs and architecture to lab notes and AI experimentation.
peraleslab.com and My Digital Pensieve
I run two sites, and they’re intentionally different.
peraleslab.com is the technical side — build logs, migration and architecture writing, lab notes, tools, and AI experiments. It’s the primary home for my long-form technical writing, some of which I also share through places like LinkedIn and X.
My Digital Pensieve is the personal side — book reviews, recipes, gardening, travel, and whatever else doesn’t belong in a technical write-up.
One is about the systems I build and the technologies I work with.
The other is about pretty much everything else.