Technical Happenings

Cloud Computing – Why is it so good for business?

• From a financial perspective, Cloud Computing pushes risks onto the people that own the assets.  The business in effect rent a particular set of assets, based on their usage. For the business this  transforms IT capex into opex.
• From a development perspective, Cloud Computing  enables you to potentially roll out your solution in minutes or hours, instead of weeks or months. An scale according to demand
• From a work activity perspective, Cloud Computing enables the enterprise to involve people regardless of organization boundaries and empower them with the necessary knowledge to perform their tasks.

There are three types of Cloud Computing paradigms that build on each other.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) -  Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the core, Amazon provides 3 basics services: Storage (S3), Computing (EC2) and Queues (SQS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – provide different combination’s of services to support the application development lifecycle
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – Saleforce.com , an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer

And these can be used in the business environment to:

• Reduce the risks associated with capital expenditure , by moving to a pay-as-you-go model
• Scaling  based on actual demand rather than best guess
• Use Amazon or another company to managing Service Level Agreements
• Allow the cloud provider to Manage problems and incident
• seamlessly upgrade to new versions of a software as the provider upgrades
• Securing data, processes and infrastructures, the use of the cloud for disaster recovery is very economical and gets away from supporting redundant data center for disaster recovery purposes
• reduce the need for staff with specific skill sets

Ruby on Rails

Not having the time to code in Java as i once did, i thought that i decided that it was about time to have a go at a new language.  I selected Ruby and the Rails framework as i had enjoyed the debate i had at QCon and felt that it would help me understand how best to utilize this type of language and framework (  we already use Groovy which is similar  ).  After just a few hours of playing around i could see the draw and after only a few more i was sold.  It is truly liberating to be able to  create database models and code over these on the fly.  I know that there are similar tools in Java, .Net, PHP and others, but the way the whole Ruby on Rails package fits together is great.  Add to this the integration with the InteliJ IDE (my favourite) and you have a great environment and the ability to use JRuby and get all the Java integration as well; my Groovy colleague would argue ‘ why not just use Groovy on Grails‘ and I must say i don’t have the answers at present, but time will tell.

QCon – One week on

Ive been back in the office for 1 week, so how has QCon helped.

Conversation around cloud computing has been a big hit. I got some good contacts and these have lead to investigation on using the Elastic computing and S3 services from amazon for one of our clients. Thoughts from ‘ The Zen of Agile Management’ have allowed me to view our Agile and Prince 2 processes in a new light; I expect my observations to work round to discussion and change in the coming weeks. Also the Domain Specific Language knowledge has invigorated conversation around framework and language selection on projects. All in all a good week.