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(Some(what)) Clear Thinking on a Cloudy Thing.

Me and Ajay brainstormed on the dynamics of an ultimate cloud computing environment. And I extracted our ideas into this (cartoon) context diagram. We are dealing with daunting levels of complexity in this area today. So ‘Abstraction’ becomes the key with which we approached this subject. An ever expanding box with a dashboard and a toilet man are the subtle(?) visual cues that convey the abstraction and ease of use. The levels of technological maturity as we expect here are not available today. This is the ‘FUTURE’. A Nirvana in Cloud Computing. And it speaks thus:

  1. The Cloud is the new operating system.

  2. Elastically growing and shrinking hardware are achieved already. The Cloud Management platform will maintain an inventory of the hardware capability - updating it as the hardware had been consumed and released.

  3. We will not deal at the application servers, BPM engines, databases level anymore. The tools will not matter. ‘DIY Blocks’ here refers to a catalog of pre-built ensembles that include operating systems and all the middleware pre-deployed, configured and integrated. One or more ensemble will be available in the catalog for each scenario (transactional applications, social computing apps, BPM apps etc). The challenge for an IT Architect is reduced to choosing the right pattern/ensemble for the business requirement.

  4. IT Architects will be relieved from the pains of choosing tools, building operational models, selecting hardware platforms, sizing and dealing with non-functional requirements. Will be they become extinct? - have to wait to see that. But they will be given more room to evolve into 'Business Architects'. The hard core techies might become Ensemble Builders.

  5. The ensemble will expose 2 types of interfaces. One to develop and deploy applications on it. The second type of interfaces are to the Cloud operating system to scale up and down. There will be standards developed in this area in the future for interface definition and interoperability.

  6. Development tools will be re-engineered to develop and deploy at this elevated levels of abstraction.

  7. Monitoring and scaling will be managed by the Cloud platform itself automagically.
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Comments

  1. SMay 19, 2010 at 3:37 PM

    eep! You're such a geek!

    ReplyDelete
  2. sreekanthMay 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM

    The presentation was innovative. BTW, who drew the picture? Are you a cartoonist?

    Cheers
    Sreekanth

    ReplyDelete
  3. Raja SPMay 19, 2010 at 11:25 PM

    S, yes, a model citizen of geekdom! :))

    Sree, thanks. Its my sketch. Some day, hope to become a caricaturist. Some of my cartoons are in earlier posts here and in my facebook album. Here is my deck just using cartoons, presented in HK - http://www.slideshare.net/spraja08/nuts-and-bolts-of-it-agility

    ReplyDelete
  4. SMay 20, 2010 at 4:44 PM

    Checked out your slides - awesome! I wish more ppt presenters would think of something innovative like that - what was your audience's reaction?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Raja SPMay 21, 2010 at 7:52 AM

    S, thanks and that is very encouraging.
    I can just say that it was right after lunch and none of the audience fell asleep :))

    Yea, it was a hit but leaving all that, i had great fun :)

    ReplyDelete

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