Cloud computing: Try it

By Greg Hubbard

When resistance to technology innovation is discussed, the resistance is usually given the face of the mythical pointy haired boss, the management, finance or business person who "just does not understand!" While this can be the case, sometimes the resistance actually comes from within Information Technology and it really shouldn't. IT should be the entity thinking "well, let's take a look..." While I don't advocate running around trying every new thing that comes along and throwing large sums of money at it in the process, I do promote looking at things in ways that are inexpensive in time and capital commitment. To that end, I use a three step process for trying out a new technology:

1. Find a way to try it out with minimal time and budget impact.
2. Discuss my experience in a large community.
3. Try it again.

Find a way to try it out with minimal time and budget impact
When I started looking at cloud computing, the first batch of reasons not to try it came from peers in the IT community. I heard "It's not stable.", "It's not secure.", "You're doomed!" So I signed up for free accounts for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Microsoft's Azure cloud products and decided to give a whirl. The key is that I wasn't trying to make a hot backup for our largest application, nor was I trying to pull off some leading edge development. I tried to make an existing, simple, but very useful, application work in the cloud. (KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.)
Discuss my experience in a large community (a.k.a. constructive complaint)
Of course I ran into problems while trying out the cloud services. Anytime you try something unfamiliar, even if it is only a new email client there are problems. (When Excite changed their web interface, the Excite community was highly upset.) I had more than a few complaints about my foray into cloud computing:

• The upload is too slow.
• The interface is not intuitive.
• The logging is too simplistic.
• I don't want to create a Linux machine to create a Windows virtual machine.

I blasted these complaints, with fully detailed code samples, onto the Internet, including Twitter and other forums. And guess what? Other people had the same problems and many had solutions.
Try it again
With a few adjustments and several of George Carlin's "Seven Words", I got the application up and working. I let it sit for a while and monitored the forums. Not so amazingly enough, when I decided to update the prototype, the problems I'd encountered were now, corrected, mitigated or, at a minimum, slated to be addressed. I made some updates and was quite pleased.
In the end, by overlooking reasons not to try something, I am better prepared for the day that I use cloud computing. And that day will definitely come - It's only a matter of time. Experimenting with cloud computing didn't cost me anything, monetarily speaking. And in terms of time, I couldn't tell you the actual amount, because 80% of it was done with my laptop flipped open while catching up on the programs in my DVR. Can everything be done this way? No, it can't. However, we have to be open to opportunities where we can say "Hey, with a little creativity and flexibility, that silly idea can work!"