Cloud computing to the max
(InfoWorld Daily Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Cloud services claim to
provide nearly everything you need without requiring you to run your
own IT infrastructure. From e-mail and Web hosting to fully managed
applications to vast on-demand computing resources, the cloud is
shaping up to be one of the most important technology shifts in the
last few years.
.....
That said, not everything is easy, nor is the cloud right for
everything. Certain technical requirements, such as very high
performance with low latency, are challenging if not impossible. But
there are a great many things that can be achieved at a lower cost and
minimal risk.
......
Why I entrusted my own business to the cloud
I recently worked for an open source software company that had
employees all over the world. That made us extremely dependent on
technology to manage interpersonal relationships, all business
functions, communications, and software development mechanics.
.......
......
Development services in the cloud
To keep development smooth and not have to spend a ton of money on
hardware, we moved all our development applications to Contegix, a
managed hosting provider that supported the range of commercial and
custom products we used. Our team also had access to the boxes so that
every change didn't have to go through a trouble-ticket process (unless
we wanted it to).
......
E-mail. We made the decision from day one that we never wanted to run
our own mail server. E-mail is critical to most businesses these days,
and it was critical in our case because we had a worldwide development
and support team, continuous integration and build servers, forums,
blogs, and so on. With all that to handle, we simply didn't want to
deal with the possibility of e-mail going down. Letting someone else
handle our e-mail sounded great. And it was great -- except when it
wasn't.
.....
As it turned out, plenty could go wrong. This was before Gmail
supported IMAP, and the POP implementation turned out to have a few
very bizarre quirks, such as the fact that you couldn't POP down e-mail
that you sent to yourself, including CCs. Messages would disappear into
the ether. And user management was a total nightmare; we had something
like 40 aliases for lists that had to be entered individually.
.......
Yes, the cloud requires you to give up some control to get benefits.
But as far as I can tell, the positives far outweigh the negatives.
Copyright ? 2008 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
Post Comment