About Me

Fifteen years is a long time to watch people make the same mistakes.

I'm Zach Snow. I've spent the better part of my career inside the MSP world - which means I've been inside everything else too. Medical practices running on prayer and a 2008 server. Law firms with no idea what's sitting on their network. Government offices that haven't patched anything since the Obama administration. Manufacturing floors where the line goes down and suddenly everyone knows my name.

You learn fast in that environment. You learn because you have to. Because there's no one above you to call and no time to wait for a vendor to call back. You figure it out or it doesn't get figured out.
That's the foundation. Everything I know, I learned by being in the room when something broke.

What I'm Building

I'm moving into Azure and cloud architecture. Not because it's trendy. Because it's where the hard problems are going and I intend to be useful when they get there. I've been living in hybrid environments long enough to understand what actually breaks during a migration and why. Intune, Entra, Exchange Online, the security stack - I know where the bodies are buried. The MSP space gave me something a lot of cloud engineers don't have. Range. Real, ugly, earned range across every vertical and every size of problem. I'm done trading that for an hourly rate that doesn't reflect it.

Why This Blog

There's a particular kind of technical article that doesn't exist yet. Not a tutorial. Not a documentation page. Something closer to an investigation. Here's the problem, here's the history of why the problem exists, here's what everyone gets wrong, here's what actually works and why.

That's what I write. If you found your way here it's probably because you were looking for something specific that you couldn't find anywhere else. Something obscure. Something that should have a clear answer but somehow doesn't. I've been there. I wrote it down so you don't have to burn the same hours I did.

Snow Native

Snow is my last name. Native is the destination. Cloud native. It felt honest.

The Other Life

I live on 10 acres outside Louisville, Kentucky with my wife and two kids under two - with more planned, because apparently we enjoy chaos and have no fear.

We run a working homestead. Horses, goats, chickens, barn cats, a livestock guardian dog that takes his job more seriously than most people take theirs. We've raised cows, pigs, rabbits. We're actively rehabilitating the land, doing real forest stewardship, building things that are meant to last.

When I step away from a screen, I'm usually outside with a problem that requires my hands. I train four days a week with a barbell. I pay close attention to what I put in my body and I'm always running some kind of experiment on myself. I listen to electronic music, Jamaican dancehall, post-Soviet doomer playlists - whatever has weight to it.

The homestead and the work aren't as different as they sound. Both reward people who go deep, pay attention to systems, and don't cut corners. The land will tell you when you've cut corners. So will a production environment at 2am.

I work remotely. If you need someone who has seen everything and still finds the work genuinely interesting - Contact me