Avoiding managed services, using Docker and running eight Mongo and twelve Kafka nodes does not make an application cloud neutral — it makes it costly to develop, Kafkaesque to architect, and impossible to maintain in production. You end up losing your weekends and quality time with family to DR exercises and production support. Continue reading Let’s talk cloud neutrality
On June 16th, Amazon announced they would acquire Whole Foods in what to me seems like the most exciting M&A event of the past couple of years. As a long time customer of Amazon Prime and Amazon Fresh, I couldn’t be more excited at the possibilities. Of course, every other retailer is terrified. There are some ways the retailers can react to competition. One way would … Continue reading Rather than innovating Walmart bullies their tech vendors to leave AWS
I am far from an early technology adopter. I did not get an iPhone till 2011. A year ago a friend introduced me to Amazon Alexa and I thought it was neat just not for me at the time. I followed the press articles about it nevertheless. Finally about two weeks ago I bought an Amazon Echo device. Immediately, it became the most used appliance … Continue reading Amazon Alexa is eating the retailers alive
This article was originally published on my Cloud Power blog at Computerworld on April 12th, 2016. On March 14th, 2016 Dropbox publicly announced that they are moving out of the Amazon cloud. It makes perfect sense for Dropbox but should not be an excuse for a reluctant IT department not to proceed with their cloud implementation plans. Here are some of the reasons why it … Continue reading Why it makes perfect sense for Dropbox to leave AWS
This article was originally published on my Cloud Power blog at Computerworld on November 10th, 2015 On October 21st, 2015, HP officially announced what many of us anticipated for months. After months of denials and flip-flopping they will shut down their HP Helion Public Cloud service. How does their SLA stack up against other cloud providers now ? The problem with HP’s cloud strategy was … Continue reading Managed IT is not the future of the cloud
NoSQL databases scale by adding more commodity servers. With more commodity servers come increased costs and complexities. Some NoSQL systems are better at this than others and need less. Continue reading Operations costs are the Achille’s heel of NoSQL
During the week of October 5th, I had an opportunity to attend the AWS re:Invent 2015 conference in Las Vegas, of all places. As someone who has built an entire career on putting together custom application server software, I should be the last one to get excited about server-less applications. Just like Salesforce’s “no software,” Amazon’s “server-less software” mantra is about a world where application development is not limited by IT, software to install and servers to manage. Continue reading IT departments must transform in the face of the cloud revolution
