Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on Cloud Computing, service orientated infrastructure, DevOps, and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are seven great articles from the week of May 16th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy!
For enterprises weighing the case for cloud applications against on-premise alternatives, this is an important additional consideration to take into account when evaluating the return on investment. People tend to focus on the perceived risk of putting your data and processes in the cloud — a risk that’s mostly exaggerated but probably merits a separate post as it’s quite topical currently. What few people consider is the equally important risk of losing competitiveness because the application stack you’ve installed can’t keep pace with the need to introduce innovative business processes.
And when you combine virtualization with an increasingly mobile workforce, the notion of IT as a service evolves into a concept in which applications and connectivity are ubiquitous and flexible enough to be delivered to a user regardless of her location or device, and regardless of the application's origins. In other words, the end user shouldn't have to know, or care, whether an application is being run out of the corporate data center, or the cloud, or some combination. All they know is that the application is available when they need it.
Private clouds are a conservative’s answer to a regular public cloud solution. Instead of losing sleep worrying about control, safety and costs of hosting data at a third party vendor’s data center, enterprises build their very own in-company, and mostly in-premises private cloud solution.
DevOps was definitely on a significant number of people's minds. Further evidence? The DevOps panel was one of the last sessions of the 5 day conference yet a sizable crowd stuck around and peppered the panelists with engaging questions.
Those who do cloud computing are often confused by the links with traditional architectural approaches and SOA. The links are pretty solid, if you ask me. There is a lot of thought that must go into the building and deployment of a cloud-based system.
The beauty of this cloud business journey is the fact while cloud can make many things happen at different levels, the realization is that this is still evolving, but for those early adopters it is clearly delivering substantial value Cloud IT and Cloud Business can’t be and needn’t be separated – scalable services and sustainable value can happen only when these two work hand in hand.
What is needed in cloud management and orchestration frameworks, whether for private or public, is a more complete, holistic approach. Architects and administrators must be able to design and specify complete end to end topologies and scenarios that support rich and complex - and realistic - workloads and deployments in the cloud. That is wholeness.
Image Credit:Â miss_rogue
