Good arguments, the question is probably how many of today's cloud users and IT departments are considering using these application building blocks directly.
They would prefer to leave this problem to the application vendors, do these people see cloud based application blocks answering their application development needs ?
While addressing some problems (scaling, replication) they arent sophisticated enough for many business problems or the current levels of application design havent got around to thinking of solutions with these building blocks as "legos".
@Sridar: Again, speaking as a technical architect working for a Fortune 500 company, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that these building blocks aren't sophisticated enough for many business problems. Rather, I agree that people simply aren't used to designing applications with this types of building blocks in mind.
Case in point: you have a need to run in multiple datacenters due either to geographic locality or purely for high availability reasons. The CAP theorem says that you can't guarantee availability and consistency at the same time here; many of the cloud building blocks don't give you strong consistency guarantees (e.g. transactions), but you've already gone down that road anyway once you've built a distributed system (assuming that availability is more important that strict consistency, which it usually is).
I think this will eventually sort itself out in the market; vendors and software companies that use these techniques will enjoy faster times to market and economies of scale and hence will drive out those who don't understand these techniques through pure economic Darwinism. Evolve or perish.
Posts
2 comments:
hi
Good arguments, the question is probably how many of today's cloud users and IT departments are considering using these application building blocks directly.
They would prefer to leave this problem to the application vendors, do these people see cloud based application blocks answering their application development needs ?
While addressing some problems (scaling, replication) they arent sophisticated enough for many business problems or the current levels of application design havent got around to thinking of solutions with these building blocks as "legos".
Tks
g s
@Sridar: Again, speaking as a technical architect working for a Fortune 500 company, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that these building blocks aren't sophisticated enough for many business problems. Rather, I agree that people simply aren't used to designing applications with this types of building blocks in mind.
Case in point: you have a need to run in multiple datacenters due either to geographic locality or purely for high availability reasons. The CAP theorem says that you can't guarantee availability and consistency at the same time here; many of the cloud building blocks don't give you strong consistency guarantees (e.g. transactions), but you've already gone down that road anyway once you've built a distributed system (assuming that availability is more important that strict consistency, which it usually is).
I think this will eventually sort itself out in the market; vendors and software companies that use these techniques will enjoy faster times to market and economies of scale and hence will drive out those who don't understand these techniques through pure economic Darwinism. Evolve or perish.
Post a Comment