Chuck Norris and The Cloud – Part II

[Latest News Headlines]

The New York event was certainly a step up in terms of location. The swanky MoMa, awaited me and I was excited from the attendee list to see what kind of a crowd and interactions this day would bring. 



By the time the various pre-discussions had been bought to order by the facilitators, the magic word “Breakfast” was mentioned. Now, if you are lucky, this might consist of some hot plates of carbonized yellow mush (eggs) and second
hand looking …….things (sausages). Oh no, not at the MoMa. We were met by an army of well groomed hip servers who placed a veritable medley of tasty morsels before us. Note to Oracle Field Marketing : Best event breakfast ever! (okay actually in the last 35 years…sorry mum).





Suitably gorged and happy, the conversation really started to flow with attendees outlining what they were doing with the Cloud and what their future intentions were. We had a customer that wanted to drive out costs and make their organization more competitive with a real implementation of Private Cloud; with hundreds of servers being grouped into a logical unit. Another customer mentioned that he wanted to “see what all the hype is all about”.

Without the Cloud vendor saturation of the San Francisco event, the New York event allowed some really interesting discussions to bloom. For instance, it was mentioned that Utility Computing was just a billing model that vendors were using to charge for the same old stuff. The






Cloud felt different, it was more real. After all, you can actually go to the web, credit card in hand and actually procure a real piece of infrastructure within a few minutes. Such IaaS providers, like Amazon, make the process very easy indeed. However, how do you run a “real” application on the Public Cloud? What about service quality, response time, 5 x 9’s availability? Sure, the infrastructure can expand well but issues around maintaining business service levels still linger around the Public Cloud. To be fair, these could just be maturity issues. As customers start to provide more and more revenue to IaaS vendors, you might start to see different tiers of IaaS service, for different price points. For development, basic integration testing, Public Cloud is hard to beat. It really does provide a good advantage to customers who require the infrastructure for short durations. Running the math does show that long term usage needs to be traded against the benefits of ownership (provided you have the internal skills and purchasing power to bring down your procurement and running costs). From any angle, I think the Public Cloud offers the hope that innovators can reduce their IT barriers to entry and focus on what really counts…making money and jumping ahead of their competition. The Private Cloud offers corporations the ability to define their own internal standards and drive enormous IT costs out of their infrastructure, as well as reduce the time it takes to deliver applications that can be quickly deployed to deliver business value.

For a blogger like me, Cloud offers a chance for me to interact with my peers in the industry and the chance for some really swanky meals in great locations!





More from the Enterprise Architecture at Oracle Blog ...