Michael gone to heaven – good for the clouds
Again, it’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m sure everyone forgives me my being careful with red and blue tainted news or even my ignoring that part of the game. Nothing to report on JavaOne? Well there was plenty to report on but a broken laptop and a (well-diserved) holiday right thereafter prevented me from blogging. I guess it’s a bit too late now: it was a great show, emotional at times, with lots of promising innovations for the future. But most has been written (hint: google on JavaOne 🙂 ) I guess.
Jump forward to today: it’s been quite an interesting day actually. Famous people passed away and apart from the actual facts, many media are issuing reports on how this affects the internet: Twitter down, Google thought they were hacked and many popular sites just couldn’t handle the loads. It’s always a shame if people die, but I’m sure no one will blame me for making a little case out of the internet side effect.
So, just when everybody thought we had seen everything and that all this everything was under control, we learn that a simple news fact can still take down the servers of sites that are supposed to have a 100% uptime. Without wanting to restart the “is cloud computing a hype or not” discussion, I think this shows how important the paradigm shift is that we are going through.
They way we are using the Internet, conventional architectures are just not good enough. We need the highest level of flexibility and scalability on every moment, cause any time, any moment the most unexpected news can break the fragile architecture we use today. And we’re obviously not there yet, because even the newest cloud applications such as Twitter (I know, many will argue that Twitter is the worst example of cloud computing because of their poor architecture) have trouble with the faintest peak. At times where load balancers are standard equipment and where bringing new (virtual) machines live takes seconds, websites still go down a lot more often than they should. Large media enterprises seem not to be there yet …
So in spite of the so-called cloud train being on the move and everybody having to hurry to jump or stay on that moving train, I hope everybody takes their time and re-thinks the stuff they are working on to make sure it actually solves problems. Instead of making announcements just to stay on the radar of analysts and the press, the world of cloud builders should make sure that the stuff their are working on actually changes the way how we work. Preferably for the better.
In the light of all this it’s good to see the bigger players embracing this paradigm shift. IBM and Oracle (there, I mentioned Red) were – cloud-related – in the news and I believe this shows that all those pioneers and innovators who have been preaching cloud for over a year now, had a vision. They were not just creating a hype. The internet has become as important as electricity and water and if we didn’t need electricity to run the internet, the net would be even more important….
Clouds and Beer 