The Cloud
Like most nerdy-types I've been interested in cloud computing for awhile now. As long as I've been doing independent consulting I've understood all too well the difference between a "managed server" and a "hosted server": the former implying that some infrastructure guy was going to be handling the patching and the installing of the other scripty things that make the computer not crash, the latter meaning they would provide a server, a rack space, and the phillips-head screws with which to mount it. Clients like the price tag of the latter and don't differentiate types of computer guy, and why should they... part of delivering really really great service means that they can call us and we ought to figure it out and not make excuses like "sounds like a server issue". In the blood and guts of long term support your best hope is that when you say "sounds like a server issue" it doesn't turn out to be your program after all, and you do the best you can to troubleshoot it.
It's these campaigns in the blood and guts of long term support that make The Cloud seem so shiny and light. Not only could you get someone to manage the stuff you are tragically unqualified to do... suddenly that whole mess gets abstracted into the commodity our programmer instincts think it ought to have been all along. The electricity analogy is apt... no more tinkering around with the 5 hp engine on the generator. If a "managed server" where the host does the updates and more importantly has a sense of implicit responsibility for keeping things running is like hiring someone else to manage your generator out in the back yard, the idea of The Cloud is like being able to pull all your electricity from the grid.
Until I watched Jeff Bezos' Startup School speech this was roughly my perception of what cloud computing could offer me - getting Windows Update as far from me as possible. But the disasterous consequences of overnight success on your server situation is the true killer use case for The Cloud. 50 instances today, 3500 tomorrow. You can't plan ahead for that, you'd be a fool to build out that kind of infrastructure. You can't react to it either, by the time you caught up you'd have suffered significant outtages. But the warehouses full of computers at AWS, Google, or Mosso could easily handle your 3450 instance blip.
I've been playing with Heroku lately, a neat tool where you upload your Ruby code, then edit it right in the browser. With Ruby being interpreted it truly achieves Anthony Stevens' target of One-Click Deployment.
It's these campaigns in the blood and guts of long term support that make The Cloud seem so shiny and light. Not only could you get someone to manage the stuff you are tragically unqualified to do... suddenly that whole mess gets abstracted into the commodity our programmer instincts think it ought to have been all along. The electricity analogy is apt... no more tinkering around with the 5 hp engine on the generator. If a "managed server" where the host does the updates and more importantly has a sense of implicit responsibility for keeping things running is like hiring someone else to manage your generator out in the back yard, the idea of The Cloud is like being able to pull all your electricity from the grid.
Until I watched Jeff Bezos' Startup School speech this was roughly my perception of what cloud computing could offer me - getting Windows Update as far from me as possible. But the disasterous consequences of overnight success on your server situation is the true killer use case for The Cloud. 50 instances today, 3500 tomorrow. You can't plan ahead for that, you'd be a fool to build out that kind of infrastructure. You can't react to it either, by the time you caught up you'd have suffered significant outtages. But the warehouses full of computers at AWS, Google, or Mosso could easily handle your 3450 instance blip.
I've been playing with Heroku lately, a neat tool where you upload your Ruby code, then edit it right in the browser. With Ruby being interpreted it truly achieves Anthony Stevens' target of One-Click Deployment.
posted by aseever at
9:41 PM
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