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
Whether my third grader becomes a software engineer when she grows up remains to be seen. The ability to customize and extend the behavior of a computer is a skill that is going to remain with her for the lifetime. If she wants to be an educator she can make educational apps. If she becomes a business person or a scientist she will be able to use computers to her advantage. This is what being a citizen developer is all about. Continue reading Collaborative work in the cloud: what I learned teaching my daughter how to code
On May 10 Salesforce experienced a day long outage and lost four hours of customer data. As of May 14, Salesforce is still in degraded state. There is a number of lessons we can learn from this. Continue reading What can we learn from the last week’s salesforce.com outage ?
Nothing riles up the passions of the developer community more than pointing out that a technology is dead. Much to my surprise, Java Enterprise Edition still has fans loyal enough to get riled up . JEE as a specification may not be dead but bloated JEE application servers most certainly are and have been for well over a decade. Continue reading JEE in the cloud era: building application servers
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
This article was originally published on my blog at Computerworld on Jan 20th, 2016 Since my last post, I had an opportunity at work to take over the responsibilities over a couple of web apps. I also implemented one from scratch. I spent the last 15 years working with Java. The last time I had anything to do with JavaScript was over a decade ago. … Continue reading JavaScript as the language of the cloud
