Appistry Blogs

In my last blog I talked a little about how the symbol of a cloud is used in system modeling sessions. For diagrams of N-tier architectures, the cloud typically symbolizes the network, and in many cases, the Internet. Similarly, clouds get drawn to represent transactional resources that we interact with.

How often do you demonstrate your development builds to your customers during development of a release?  Unfortunately if you are like most agile teams that I encounter the answer is not very often, if ever.  If you are practicing agile software development you know about the importance of working in short increments.  But do you really extract all the value you can from your iteration?  Let me elaborate with a real life example I encountered recently.

From essentially nowhere less than a year ago, Cloud Computing has quickly risen to the top of the IT industry agenda and has everyone talking about what amounts to an exciting new way to deliver applications and services.

With this growing buzz as backdrop, three brand new Cloud-focused events launched in San Francisco last week, bringing together a host of key players from the rapidly growing Cloud Computing ecosystem.

Microsoft TechEd 2008 was held in Orlando, Florida the week of June 2nd.  I was fortunate to attend many of the technical sessions.  I was surprised how many speakers were conveying the same message: 

CPU speeds are topping out.  If you want your applications to run faster and better you are going to have to build your applications in a new way.  The solution isn't just to learn how to multi-thread your applications.  The solution lies in building your applications into smaller units of code called tasks that can be moved around to the different cores of a multi-core machine.

Even in Bill Gates' keynote speech he said

We're a bunch of gadget-hounds here at Appistry, so when one of our favorite gadgets -- GeoEye-1 -- was written up by one of our favorite gadget blogs -- Gizmodo -- we were all pretty psyched.

The cloud. The cloud has been with us technical folks for a long time. Typically, the cloud is used to represent an aggregation of resources that are "out there" to be used. Of course, most famously, the cloud is used to represent the vast aggregation of resources that is the Internet.

Structure08 is well underway and going well. A couple of good places to follow the flow, including Summize.

Also, check out my twittering here, and Sam's here.

I'm reposting this morning's CloudCamp press release here. If you're in SF next week, please join us for what will most certainly be a very informative and enjoyable evening. We're very happy to support and help organize this event. If you're planning to stop by, leave a note in the comments and I'll look out for you!

This time last year mobile devices seemed really stale ... it had been years since meaningful change. There were lots of promises and rumors of good stuff to come, yet actual new devices all seemed to be hardly any different at all from the tired ones you held in your hand.

I was recently interviewed by the good folks at InfoQ, and the resulting interview has been posted to their site.

The interview spanned a variety of topics including our Open Distribution program, Spring support, and our over-all strategy; I encourage you visit InfoQ to take a look at it.

One exchange I did want to highlight here was about how we think of ourselves relative to grid and cloud computing: