Part of the fun of joining my new employer is their open policy for selecting the laptop of your choice. Of course, being a lover of technologies that enable one to be technically lazy, I chose a MacBook Pro. It should arrive in a few days.
However, I was beginning to feel like I needed another beefed up system of my own at home to act as a multi-guest virtual "server farm" for various experiments, etc., that may include scale-out benchmarking, interesting integration issues, etc. My initial thought was a 8-core Mac Pro loaded with memory and disk, which would have set me back about $6500. So I asked Luis what he thought, and he said, "Don't Bother. Whenever I need a bunch of servers to test with, I generally find [Amazon] EC2 works perfectly fine."
You could have heard the head slap a mile away.
With all of my focus being on enterprise computing the last two years, I had totally lost sight of the "individual" applications of a cloud like EC2. I no longer have to think about building up a server farm of my own, or purchase a big honkin' dual Quad-core tower, or even reserve space on the corporate "cluster library". I just need my credit card, my Amazon account, and a little time with the "Getting Started" tutorial, and I have all the server resources I need at a price that is a fraction of buying the big box, with billing that allows me to easily expense work-related computing. Damn, I love the modern world!
Now, all of this probably seems so obvious to all of you out there, and it probably cracks you up to see a cloud computing blogger miss this opportunity to "reach for the clouds", so to speak. However, I think this is indicative of the change that both individuals and enterprises must go through to take advantage of these new breed of technologies.
I, like may Fortune 500 IT departments, am an old school client-server/SOA guy. I have a "use the right tool for the job" mentality, driven by years of pain trying to force procedural pegs into SOA holes. This mentality leads to a "best of breed" bias that leads one to worry about the ground up implementation of any software solution. If a tool was found that reliably hid some of that implementation, that was awesome and incredibly helpful to productivity. However, one needed to still understand how the server worked with the OS worked with the middleware worked with the application implementation to be comfortable to go to production.
To me, Amazon, Mosso, Cassatt and others are indicative of a major change in this mentality. With reliable shared configurations of systems (or a reliable systematic infrastructure for matching compute tasks to disparate resources that can handle those tasks), application developers now need to know less and less about the server, networking and storage part of the equation. Now, with the focus from the OS on up the stack, developers can start shopping for the infrastructure that makes economic sense for the problem they are trying to solve. The trick, of course, is to remember there are alternatives to buying your own servers.
So, this week I started to play with Amazon EC2, S3 and Cloud Services' new instance management tool, Cloud Studio. Let me just say, I am incredibly impressed with what I've done so far, which is little more than creating, starting and terminating instances (with a little between machine networking thrown in for fun). Even using Amazon's command line tools, it is a pretty straight forward process to get either a 32-bit or 64-bit server, but when you add the visual cues of Cloud Studio, it just becomes so simple it boggles the mind.
Now, there are definitely disadvantages to using Amazon for some problems. Windows support is out, for instance. (Anyone have a good suggestion for a true on-demand pricing option for Windows? Mosso would work, I hear, but they have a fixed upfront price that is a little steep for my general needs.) Also, any work that involves large amounts of data transfer ups the ante greatly. (Kevin Burton talked about this some time ago--see his note about bandwidth pricing just below the last quote, about half way down.) However, I will never again forget to consider the cloud before "own your own" for any computing task I have in my personal world.
Hmmm. I wonder if I can get my wife to use Zoho now...
