First day at Devoxx was all about cloud computing. At least that were the sessions I picked out. The first session introduced all the concepts and bizz words. John Willis did a pretty good job and he definitely knew what he was talking about. But I wanted more. Luckily, after the lunch break Chris Richardson explained us all about the Amazon cloud web services which gave me a more in depth view on things. After these 2 sessions, I can only conclude we are not there yet. OK, everything can be managed now in a nice UI (you can even choose). BUT.. SimpleDB needs a whole different approach of programming your product and does it suite our needs? I mean, it might be faster to read the data and scale easy, but do we need to offer all the good things we get from relational databases? I guess not. Let’s be honest: how may facebooks, googles, yahoos are out there? OK, MySql is supported now, but how will it scale and how about the I/O latency on all these virtual instances. Also, cloud computing is presented as the way to go for a start up company. Indeed, that might be the case if you could just drop in your war file, specify how many cores and memory you want and let it access a MySql or Oracle database or whatever other service you running on an other instance. Not to speak about the infrastructure work the EC2 platform requires as it just provides the infrastructure (IaaS). All should be set up in such a way that when an instance is powered up/down or replicated, the configuration and setup is scripted so it can be restored from scratch. I’m not an operation guy, but from my experience as a developer, this can become a huge task I think.
The good news is that there are some companies out there now offering PaaS, coming close to the war upload scenario, making the deployment task a lot easier. And, more and more new competitors are trying to get their share of the market. So we can only hope that the competition pushes them forward to a one-click-deployment. Hmmm, that sounds Amazon’ish 