Interesting points here Baz.
I personally think the likes of GAE, SalesForce, Azure, are _NOT_ the
future of cloud computing. This is vendor lockin at its worse. It
does not matter what SLA is in place, there is no SLA that will make up
for lost revenue and lost good will in the event of a failure. If you
are at the point of executing the SLA in an agreement then your business
is already on the dry ground in its last death flap. They are a
placebo, something the higher ups need to cross the i's and dot the t's.
I do believe Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Joyent etc are the future of
cloud computing. This is where we gain the portability, the
flexibility and the ability for competition. Once you have your
enterprise on GAE/SalesForce, you are forced to eat their charges,
because the cost of redevelopment to move will most like be too much.
Where as moving between Amazon and Rackspace is a piece of cake -
something you don't have to let your developers get involved with, you
let your IT department make that call.
As for Facebook - I am not aware they run on the public cloud (amazon
etc). I always understood they had their own data-centers. Twitter
utilizes Amazon S3, but they run their own servers from what i
understand. I know Facebook developers, have benefited from the cloud
(Amazon and Joyent) when developing their 3rd party apps/games. But the
core Facebook platform is on their own stuff.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/17/a-look-inside-facebooks-data-center/
Now as for renaming "OpenBD" ... don't joke ... that is something we've
kicked around a long time, as well as the notion of whether we really
need to be "CFML" anymore and evolve the language ourselves. We no
longer race to keep up with ACF because, we do as our community, you,
want us to do.
Baz wrote:
Guys, PAAS is the future, there is no doubt about that. Right now
companies are wasting tons of money duplicating IT departments that
run grossly under-utilized hardware. This is not going to last.
Companies that go cloud will have a significant competitive advantage
and win. I was just reading an article about how Facebook would not
have been possible a few years earlier because the lack of cloud
technology would have made their growth too costly and painful. There
was a time, less than a decade ago, when tech startups would have to
cut checks for half their seed money on the first day of business to
the likes of Oracle, SUN, BEA, EMC, et al, just to get up and running.
No more.
This is a new game, and OpenBD is early out the gate. We survived the
toughest phase, and things will certainly and necessarily stabilize
through time. Especially now, Google is releasing an SLA
<http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html> and are starting to take
things seriously. I'd start pushing even harder right now - maybe even
doing a big release to coincide with the SLA. It may even be time to
rename "regular" OpenBD to Qwikster
<http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/18/netflix-qwikster/> or something :)
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