It’s easy to fall in the trap. Precise numbers help others trust that you are accurate.
However, precision is not accuracy. Someone can say, “Your package will arrive in 5 days, 2 hours and 15 seconds.”. That is pretty precise, but it may not be accurate. On the other side, “Your package will arrive in 5 days.” is not very precise, but it can be accurate.
An accurate answer or estimate is, most of the time, more precious than a precise one.
Last Friday, I’ve attended the first CloudCamp event here in Montreal. Being more experienced in traditional systems and services administration, I was very intrigued about what would be the main interests and concerns of the Cloud’s early adopters. But first, to get there, we first need to agree on what is Cloud Computing.
The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) came out with a very good definition (original document can be found here):
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability [...]“
Simply put, the five essential caracteristics of a Cloud are:
- On-demand self-service;
- Broad network access;
- Resources pooling;
- Rapid elasticity;
- Measured service.
The main question business owners should ask themselves when they switch to the cloud is “how much money will I loose if this thing goes down?” (because, yes, it could). While the technologies put in place by major Cloud Computing providers is very good, switching is always a trade between flexibility and control. Before going cloud, a few questions should be asked:
In business context, this should always be viewed more from a business perspective more than a tech-trends perspective. Those risks can be calculated.
There are also many legal issues. Remember that your data can be stored anywhere in the World and the ability to define where you want it to be hosted is not supported by all providers. For instance, if your data is stored in the US, it is subject to the Patriot Act.
The conversation about security was obviously the main topic of the event. Environment (power consumption, cooling, etc.), application development and management (systems, people, etc.) could have been more discussed. Hope that by next year, most of those security concerns will have been solved by robust and proven solutions so we can dive into other very interesting subjects.
As a side note, Nicolas Roberge posted on his blog cool pictures of the event.
Have you ever dreamed about a neat tool that would allow you to find out easily what technologies a given website use?
I’ve stumbled upon a clean Web application that does it all. It is called Built with. That tool can tell you what HTTP server, CDN, server-side Framework or JavaScript library a website uses. Try it with cnn.com.
If you’re here, you’re curious. That’s good. I am too.
This website has been left alone for a while, because I am working on something huge.
It’s called Giftiniti. Giftiniti aims at changing the way we offer and receive gifts.
Go, check it out.