Software Engineering lost in the cloud?

It would seem the cloud is making you a lazy software engineer. Engineers these days are now have a ready answer for most of the architectural and design concerns - "its taken care at the cloud". This perception is scary and appears to makes any tom-dick-harry engineer with minimal to zero computer/software knowledge "become" "master" software-engineer overnight. This halo is bothering. Whatever happened to clean code / patterns essential to designing your software during the days of distributed computing setup in local clusters ? Perhaps none today cares about minimizing traffic across nodes and syncing time across nodes nor time sharing and optimizing resources during your minimal time at the node. Not sure the solution for this until you are choked to become yet another Harry. hashtag

Azure opens up for Private cloud - Windows Azure Platform Appliance

MS announced yesterday that Azure would soon be available for deploying on your local datacenters. Effectively, you could soon create private clouds using MS Azure. This is a great move especially if you were concerned about data security in the public cloud and subscription costs.

But still, the upfront cost could be high; this is not yet published. Check more here

This is also interesting since my last blog entry did refer to this thought!

Cloud Thoughts - 2

What if there was a mechanism to provision PaaS cloud environments (say MS Azure ) on public servers? Theoretically, if I had a free server(/cloud), I would install the "Azure runtimes" and add it to an existing cloud for others to use.

Registering a server to this free public cloud would then be a voluntary effort. This could have been a possibility if Azure allowed in-premise setup in the first place.

Can I call the end result as "Distributed Cloud Computing" ? Cloud computing that is distributed.

Cloud Thoughts - 1

A few cloud related thoughts


Cloud Cumulus

A single cloud access point that internally seamlessly talks with the subscribed cloud providers. Eg:- Subscriber A could subscribe to the services of Amazon, Google and Micrsoft (yes, Subscriber A is quite well off) cloud services. Subscriber A would deploy the same app on each of these servers and provide a single service URI. Subscriber A's customers would be serviced by one of the cloud provider seamlessly - perhaps with parts of the request being handled by more than one provider. Session states, data etc being shared across clouds is interesting.

For A's customer, there is only one cloud. The cloud of cloud providers / Cumulus Cloud accessed with a single entry point.

Perhaps, once the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) is in place, this could be built?


Upgrade Ease

How easy is it to upgrade a cloud based app that is actively serving hundreds of users? Came across this for Azure :  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee517254.aspx

Not sure what happens to the application state. If an 'In-Place' upgrade is followed, does it mean that at a particular point in time there could be two instance of the same application running on different versions?


Chess On Cloud

Though there are numerous instances of distributed chess engines, has anyone attempted to get a chess engine on the cloud? I guess the only person who can try this out today is Bill with his Azure and his $'s.