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My last company was a small startup building a web game. Budget was minimal and we had plenty of developing skills, and very little of administration ones (particularly dba-ing - after some months, I ended up doing it because I had some theoretical background on this, but no real experience).
Well, network and load problems killed us. The company is now half the size (I left, and guess, I am doing some successful dba-ing now!).
That's where azure would help: integration with windows live could really improve the initial registration process (great if you want new clients), and the whole "I design my entities, upload them, and they are stored in some way" was something we knew how to do. Entities, object orientation etc were natural to all the team. And let's face it: oo developers are way more numerous than DBAs.
Yes, we had performance issues in the code too, but that's we would have solved much faster if we had been concentrating on that.
And I don't think that the extra money per month to MS would be more than what we were paying for database hosting, what we paid the externals for performance monitoring and what we paid in term of disappointed users.
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Rehosting my site providing downloads of videos of me wearing nothing but rollerblades and sunglasses, shooting pigeons from my front porch with a pellet gun. Revenue growth has fallen short of market projections to date, so I'm thinking maybe the Cloud isn't ready for my services yet. We'll see...
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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While I can speculate I have intentionally not done any research into the topic. Once again, until the majority of developers learn fundamental concepts these latest and greatest buzzwords are meaningless because there is/are teams of idiots just waiting to bring it down with their mad skilz.
Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.
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It seems like everything these days is going to a subscription model. I don't want my software going there. I like to pay for things up front and one time.
Hogan
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Pay and keep paying is not for me!
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snorkie wrote: It seems like everything these days is going to a subscription model. I don't want my software going there. I like to pay for things up front and one time.
I actually agree with this, but I think the concept will eventually be integrated into more OSes like Linux/Unix, etc. I mean, if you take Amazon's EC2 it's not the end all be all, it's just one manifestation of the concept of scalable parallel computing. However, if you look at how Windows is doing it, it'll be it's own OS rather than have an OS sit on top of it.
Eventually, people will follow suite once it catches on enough to implement these concepts into XYZ. I mean if MS does, Apple will have to for their servers just to stay competitive for instance. And if it's part of the OS, then perhaps it won't be subscription based.
Keep in mind, think of Amazon's EC2 as a web host with infinite scalability in performance. You don't have to charge a subscription fee for YOUR software, but to use their service you have to pay (price per computing unit and bandwidth). If I had a typical client/server app today, and I didn't run the server myself I'd be expected to pay a fee for someone else to do it no matter what, even for OSS. Same concept.
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A central computer with users at dumb terminals has been tried, it worked great but has been replaced anyway.
Or perhaps the following prediction is coming true?
"We anticipate a global world-maket with place for perhaps five computers."
Tom Watson, IBM 1949
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: A central computer with users at dumb terminals has been tried, it worked great but has been replaced anyway.
It's not necessarily like that. Although you can run the whole app in the cloud, you don't have to, and I suspect that in most cases there will still be a client application running on the user's system. There certainly will be in our case.
And even if the whole app does run remotely, the interface is still the user's browser, which means that you have all of the scripting capabilities that weren't available in dumb terminals. I really don't think it's the same thing.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: A central computer with users at dumb terminals has been tried, it worked great but has been replaced anyway.
Um, how is this different than any other web page (in theory)? I mean, CP is a central computer(s) with a dumb terminal (your browser). A cloud is just an extension of that concept.
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Yeah, that whole web thing is so last decade...
(You know you are on a website, right? dumb browser, big server...)
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Paul Watson wrote: Yeah, that whole web thing is so last decade...
Crap, you said it better than I. Next time I tell ya; next time. 
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Woops, sorry Jeremy, I didn't read yours (flying visit!) You said it first. Mine was more sarcastic, the recourse of dimwits.
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Paul Watson wrote: Woops, sorry Jeremy
No need for all that. You in fact helped reinforce my point - which is good.
Paul Watson wrote: I didn't read yours
Surely you jest? You mean you failed to be instantaneously subdued by the mere lure of my name being next to a post that you couldn't find yourself capable of doing anything but mentally desiring the absolute luxury and privilege of reading my post? 
Paul Watson wrote: Mine was more sarcastic, the recourse of dimwits.
It was funny IMO.
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You're both reinforcing mine.
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Paul Watson wrote: What has replaced it?
Thin client, the web, etc. But, the concept never went away, it just evolved. So, the idea never got really replaced to begin with.
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So we aren't reinforcing his post...?
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Paul Watson wrote: So we aren't reinforcing his post...?
Not the way I read it. 
I took it to mean the dumb terminal concept is gone, but it's clearly not. It just evolved and we call it something else.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: You're both reinforcing mine.
You did actually read our posts correct?
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I'm somewhat surprised at how few people voted positively on this one...I expected everyone to be jumping on it.
Does "edge caching" count as "the cloud"? I don't even know where the lines are anymore, it's all just a bunch of buzzwords. But I imagine if S3 can be considered part of the cloud, so can edge caching. I'm currently debating between a cloud storage system (i.e. S3) and edge caching for an application that is in development. Either will save bucketloads of money for my client and make me a ton more (less overhead). The nature of the app is such that one week there could be zero users, and the next week there could be 100,000 users downloading multimedia content at once, so it is perfectly suited for a "pay as you go" cloud environment. 100,000 users isn't huge, so a couple servers can handle the processing/database load, but try streaming video to that many users at once without racking up an insane bill for the required dedicated 8 gigabits of bandwidth 
My monthly bill if three such "waves" of users come in a cloud environment: about $3500
My monthly bill if I needed 8 gigabit connections: hahaha...riiight...I'll leave that one for your imagination.
modified on Monday, November 3, 2008 7:10 AM
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"Cloud" sounds a good idea but users may not see its benefit until it becomes a proven reliable techinology/service. Past experience shows that many tech/services disappeared before they even really started.
TOMZ_KV
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It is and will always be, useless.
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With all due respect...you, sir, are ignorant if you think all cloud services are useless. Implemented properly, you get much higher reliability than any self-made or managed hosting solutions, you can scale at a moments notice, and your costs can be substantially reduced.
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Yes maybe so.. it works for a few Businesses.. but hey .. ...tell me what happens when it goes 'tits up' and its out of your hands in respect of being able to sort out the recovery....??????
How much will it then cost you .....?????????????????????
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