CloudCamp Dunedin
Friday, July 23rd, 2010I went to CloudCamp Dunedin yesterday, which I think went very well. Ben Kepes did a great job of encouraging people through the Unconvention structure, and our lightning talk speakers covered a wide range of ideas between them. Just a shame that I had to leave before the wrapup (& pizza!).
There were a lot of different people present, and “the cloud” means some very different things to all of them. I tend to see the system architectural view first, where I worry about how to marshall the resources that go into the cloud, and how software has to be structured to make best use of this different type of environment. But it’s interesting to see how cloud services rather than cloud machines are empowering developers to be able to cut out the middleman of system administrators.
An analogy for that was voiced at the time; currently we’re all like factories running our own power generators, doing our own maintenance and finding our own fuel. But the cloud services move us to just grabbing electricity from the grid. We might still worry about the cost and service level of our power supply, but we don’t employ our own engineers …
(Personal input — my father had a long career as a mechanical engineer for factory power systems, and my father-in-law is a high-voltage electrical engineer)
With a long term background in system administration, I might feel a little threatened by this, but on the whole I can see that its a good thing to be able to move on. With my security hat on, I’m worried about developers exposing their code directly to large-scale on the Internet without the benefit of actually having it evaluated or engineered correctly, but then again that’s part of the free market — if they do a bad job their apps won’t succeed, if they do a good job all will be well.
The economics of cloud services are also interesting; your first hit is free, and for at least one established NZ web-based application provider I know, their entire target market’s usage is low enough to let them run systems with zero infrastructure cost. Think about that for a minute — they can prove their platform in an NZ marketplace, and only have to pay for staff time. That’s a tremendous economic advantage for a small business …