Comments on: Tim O’Reilly vs. Nick Carr

By: Markus Klems

Markus Klems — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:18:34 +0000

You are certainly right that time to market is a crucial issue and that in the end you only need an infrastructure that scales up if your applications and services are successful. On the other hand, one could argue that “Failure” is an equally important issue as “Success”. If you cannot scale your service down when it becomes unpopular (or isn’t needed anymore at all, such as with Websites for one-time events), you are stuck with your CapEx.

The thing is that in a somewhat open environment, that allows third-party developers, like RightScale, to join the game, innovation does not depend so much on the Cloud Computing provider. The provider can concentrate on core IaaS issues and let others care for the tools and frameworks.

Thanks for your comment.

By: Edward M. Goldberg

Edward M. Goldberg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:45:45 +0000

I enjoyed this post, your point that the Developer Facing effect are the important ones IMHO misses a very important issue.

Success.

For Cloud Deployments the best feedback for the growth of the idea continues to be that it works. Time to market is a very key feature that we tend omit talking about.

What the users see is applications sooner that stay working under loads that vary wildly over time. This is a very good thing.

The users have responded by adoption of new services with a higher level of trust.

Before Cloud Solutions we just assumed new services will be flaky and given time they will “Get Up To Speed”.

This feedback IMHO drives the Cloud and is why start ups are doing so well this this new technology.

Edward M. Goldberg