Hope everyone had a great memorial day weekend. Sunny skies and hot here in Chicago. With the Summer nearing, I thought I’d add a topic stream to my blog called Hot Tech. Let’s start with one I like “the cloud”.
At first when cloud came along I thought it’s just the latest buzzword to outsource your infrastructure. Companies like Google or Amazon had tons of compute and storage to be able to run their massive businesses. So they’ve figured out how to really efficiently provide and share infrastructure with others. Big deal. Why not just give my compute and storage to some datacenter provider.
Then the word SHARED infrastructure hit me. They could share only the infrastructure I needed at a given point of time. So when I used little they could give that infrastructure to someone who needed more. Not only can cloud providers share infrastructure they can have us share software and data. Now I suddenly went from “so what” to “this is awesome”.
So when you think about your cloud strategy and what makes sense just think about “sharing” or “only paying when you are using”
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). If I’m only paying when I’m using it makes sense that my test, quality, training or other temporary environments go to the cloud. Your production instance maybe or maybe not.
Data-as-a-service. Why not have some central entity collect public information and share it with you just when you need it. Traffic data for example. Let someone figure out the traffic situation and I’ll incorporate that info into my route planning software to determine you optimal route. All our car GPSs do this now.
DataWarehousing-as-a-service. Why not just pay for a report when you are running the query. Let others pay for that infrastructure when they are running their reports. Sounds like another win-win.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS). Instead of me just sharing data with you, let’s create an application that uses this great data to provide you a service. An early warning system that tells B2B customers of a supply chain outage. Better yet, let's offer a supply chain planning tool that has services like supply chain outage constraints built into it.
Development Platform-as-a-service (PasS). Since asking for compute now is software driven companies created their own development platforms. They make money by you using the service on their infrastructure so they can basically give the services away for free.
The list goes on and on when you start thinking about the win-win situation the “as-a-service” providers can create. Just make sure the vendor you are working with is truly designed their offering in an “as-a-service” way. Many are still just hosting their software in the cloud but are not taking advantage of all the other cloud services. Those are NOT “as-a-service solutions”
Unless someone comes up with a better mousetrap almost EVERYTHING IT will move to the cloud. Sunny skies just cause skin cancer.