Writing applications for cloud
environments is a different affair that writing for in-house hosting. At the
All About the Cloud summit in San Francisco this week, the focus was on what
changes developers need to make to their applications to enable their optimal
use in the Cloud. Perhaps the most interesting revelation offered during the
event was that of the direct correlation between billing and the quality of
source code.
Treb Ryan, CEO and founder of OpSource, said in a keynote talk that Cloud hosting offers “the best margins I have seen in the hosting business.” He added
that Amazon has largely played down the profitability of Cloud hosting, and he
suggested they have done so to scare off potential competition. OpSource has
been offering hosting for software-as-a-service applications for more than five
years and has relatively recently entered the Cloud hosting business.
Ryan said that applications hosted in the Cloud are under a performance
microscope. If they send too many requests to the database, that will be
reflected by a higher bill at the end of the month. He said that developers
writing applications for deployment in the Cloud need to realize that “bad code
costs me twice as much as good code. I can cut my op costs in half” by
optimizing the code.
Thus, said Ryan, developers can see a direct correlation between the code they've
worked on all month and the reduction in their Cloud hosting bill. That's
something developers haven't really been able to do since the days of
mainframes and time-sharing.
Elsewhere at the All About the Cloud summit, attendees and speakers discussed
the remaining problems of the Cloud. Integrating Cloud applications with
on-site systems was one of the first and most painful points discussed.
Paul Daugherty, chief technologies architect at Accenture, said, “We are at an
inflection point where integration becomes more critical. Increasingly we're
seeing a big increase in data sources used. Initially integration was about two
different applications, but now it's getting into the 10s and 20s.
"There was an interesting piece of research Gartner did: They looked at
companies using SaaS applications. One of the less obvious data points out of
their sample respondents was that 14% or 15% adopted SaaS, then reversed back
out onto on-premise. The No. 1 reason for that is cost of integration, and cost
required was too great."
Another remaining Cloud issue is security, said Ryan. “We're still addressing
security. The idea that the vast majority of Cloud environments have the same
user name and password for all users is ridiculous."
He added that most Cloud providers do not currently offer a way to tie multiple
accounts together, and thus whole companies sometimes use the same login and
password for their Cloud environments. Instead, Ryan would prefer accounts that
could be used by each user, but could also be tied together for collaboration
on the same virtual machines within the Cloud.
from SDTimes, By Alex Handy
Synergetics India: IT Consulting and Training Services
on .NET 4.0, SQL server 2008 BI. Awarded as the Best. NET Training Service
Provider by Microsoft.
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