Cloud

We are entering a period where custom, highly-optimized, vertical solutions are becoming viable option again. This is a good news for ISVs with proven domain expertise and skilled development resources. Why do I think so? We now have: Plethora of feature-rich developer frameworks, message queues, scalable data stores, and even lower-level components in the OSS community with great documentation and a large number of use-case validation Growing number of custom solution companies (more than just ISVs) with existing deep vertical/domain expertise who are also increasingly now investing in hiring and training strong development teams Virtually every Cloud provider offering either a raw Kubernetes service or managed container execution platform which (regardless how you feel about these technologies) creates ubiquitous surface area that can be addressed with a single solution Yes, there still are many ways in which these custom development efforts can fail. Still, as one who has started their professional career developing custom software, I’m glad to see how these kinds of efforts are becoming cost effective again and increasingly represent a viable option for differentiation and real business value delivery. ...

Over the holidays, as many of us do, I embarked on a little extra-curriculum development effort I called thingz.io. I was driven by the pattern I’d observed in Data Center (DC) monitoring products; although that pattern also exists in many of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. ...

As part of my recent solution review, I wanted to compare a few performance metrics specific to multi-node data service deployment on different clouds. This post is about my experience with Google Compute Engine (GCE) as part of that evaluation. ...

Over the last decade, the access to best-of-bread data technologies has become easier. This is due mainly to the increasing popularity of open source software (OSS). While this phenomenon holds true in other areas like operating systems, application servers, development frameworks or even monitoring tools, it is perhaps most prevalent in the area of data. ...

As a long-term Cloud storage user I recently wanted to re-evaluate my options. New content management providers became available and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing on the new shinny tech out there. As I was considering the pros and cons of each option, I realized the apparent shift in my personal attitude towards cloud data storage over last few years. My concerns used to be solely with security. Now, while the data security is still critical, I am much more interested in data access, ownership, integration and its control. ...