See previous: Infrastructure as a Service sometimes is another name for old school hosting

At the upcoming Cloud Expo, Bill will cover design patterns for Cloud Computing, however, here is a a light analogy that I like to use to explain what we mean by “Decades old Patterns may not be applicable”.

In the past, performance was king. The faster your applications ran, the better the design. The better the architect, the better the developer.

In the Cloud world, performance is a commodity. With elastic cloud, it’s easy to expand and contract your application to run faster or relax against processing demand. It’s not even just easy – you don’t have to think about it.

Consider this scenario. Let’s say you have a giant image file of a high resolution photograph (assume it’s big, roughly 2 GB) and you have been asked to superimpose a Bend Sinister on top of it (think Ghost Buster’s Logo).

In the past, the fastest way to do this would be using vector based graphics. Take the whole image, toss it up into memory, and then use an algorithm to draw the Bend Sinister on top of the image. Super fast, very performant – you get lots of pats on the back.

Today if you did that in the Cloud, you’d get some frowns. Compute time costs money. Nothing is free in the Cloud. Even storage costs money, and storage is cheaper than compute.

So in the Cloud, this same requirement for a Bend Sinister drawn on top of a photograph, may be best designed by creating two images – one of the original photograph and the other of a Bend Sinister. This keeps the drawing in storage, rather than compute. Cheaper. Then superimpose them onto one another.

There are many scenarios were traditional software design may need to be revisited to maximize cost and efficiency in the Cloud. Usually clever performance design techniques are the first place to start.

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Full summary here: Five Opinions on Cloud Computing in New York City

See Previous: Amazon Web Services viewed as the top player for Cloud in NYC

In my last role before leaving Microsoft, I served as a Web Strategy Lead for the Middle East and Africa. This is where I learned about how telcos and hosters go to market. There are typically 2 different packages that are sold. One is physical hosting where there is actually a piece of hardware given to a customer for use. This hardware can be owned by the customer and “carried in” to the hoster for management (e.g. colocation). Or the hardware can be purchased by the hoster on behalf of the customer. Either way the hoster manages the hardware and infrastructure, whereas the customer is generally responsible for the software and platform. Rackspace is a well known provider of such services. This type of hosting has been around since the late 80s.

Another scenario is virtual hosting. In addition to having a physical box, there will also be virtual instances on that box. There can be many of these, usually up to a certain cap. This cap is designated usually by the amount of money that the customer pays for the hosting. In this scenario, the hoster manages the hardware infrastructure; however the customer may also ask the hoster to manage platform and software too. Drupal Gardens, by Acquia hosting and force.com by Salesforce are two good examples of these. This type of hosting emerged in the last 10 years or so.

These days, this “old school” hosting is often rebranded as Infrastructure as a Service. This is why some hosters claim to have been doing Cloud for decades.

Slalom has a dedicated Advanced Infrastructure Services team that has won awards in this space, especially around the Office 365 suite of products.

For our local Cloud team in New York, we focus on helping customer design, redesign and develop on-premise, hybrid and cloud applications in the Cloud. This goes beyond hosting.

By hosting an application into the Cloud, doesn’t necessarily mean it will take full advantage of the Cloud. Sure, the billing may be cheaper and the management costs may be reduced. However, there are very specific design considerations that need to be adjusted to fully take advantage of the Cloud. Which leads to my next point.

See next: Decades old Software Patterns may not be applicable in the Cloud

Full summary here: Five Opinions on Cloud Computing in New York City

Read full summary:Five Opinions on Cloud Computing in New York City

Roughly five or four years ago, Amazon Web Services entered the market as Infrastructure as a Service, enabling companies to “forklift” their applications into the Cloud. This early entry served them well as they soon be came known as the de facto Cloud provider, even later, when Platform as a Service became the rage.

I remember back in 2008, when our Microsoft evangelism team ran the Financial Services Developer Conference for Microsoft. We had chosen High Performance Computing (HPC) as a theme, because Compute Cluster had just come out. At the time, Oracle was touting grid computing. Both Grid & HPC were the darlings of the Wall Street firms – allowing analytics to be “burst” into multiple HPC nodes, saving tons of processing time. A perfect scenario for this was running complex Excel algorithms in the Cloud.

At the same time, I had heard that Amazon had paid a visit to a group of a hundred or so female technologist at Goldman Sachs. I remember at the time being confused at why Goldman would be looking at a retailer for technology. Amazon wasn’t there to be a case study. They were there to be a Cloud Service provider. This was 4 years ago, when as a Microsoft evangelism team talking about bleeding edge beta products, we hadn’t even begun covering Azure.

Because of this early pioneering, Amazon now has great mind share with the CIOs of small and medium business, as well as large enterprises. At Slalom, we find that both Microsoft and Amazon can provide the best of breed Cloud technologies; however there are times when CIOs already have a preference in mind, and that oftentimes will be Amazon.

For customers who do not have a preference or those who want to avoid vendor lock-in, the team offers a Comparative Study, to help CIOs choose when one platform works better over the other. In nearly every case, either Amazon or Microsoft Cloud will provide an excellent platform to meet the business requirements for that customer.

See next: Infrastructure as a Service sometimes is another name for old school hosting