Simple Chronicle!

Jimmy Valvano gave a great speech in 1993 that I have seen several times over the years. My takeway from the speech:

Jimmy mentions that there are three things we all should do every day:

1. Lauch – we should laugh every day.

2. Think – we should spend some time in thought every day.

3. Emotions – we should have our emotions moved to tears, happiness or joy every day.

What a heck of a speech! RIP Jimmy!

This is a song by Pink Floyd that I always think about when I need to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

There have been a lot of articles recently on trying to standardize the definition of cloud computing by Berkeley, McKinsey, IBM. This is my definition of the cloud computing stack:

Infrastructure/Delivery Platform

Managed Hosting (RackSpace, OpSource)

• Developers set up/obtain their infrastructure from a managed provider
• Superior levels of service

On-Demand Infrastructure (Amazon EC2/S3, RightScale)

• Do-it-yourself
• Faster provisioning of capacity
• Ability to scale up and down as needed
• Lower service levels and lack of customization

Development Platform in the Cloud

• Integrated Development Environment in the Cloud (MS Azure, Coghead/SAP, Bungee Labs)
• Flexibility and Programmer Convenience
• Allows developers to create SaaS applications easily

Application Platform in the Cloud (Google AppEngine, Force.com)

• Pre-defined application structure and framework
• Automatic scaling up and down of computation, network and server

Applications in the Cloud (Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Cisco WebEx, MS Hosted Exchange)

• Complete end user application sold as a service
• Pay-as-you-go model

In this model:

Applications in the Cloud = ”Software-as-a-service”

Application Platform in the Cloud + Development Platform in the Cloud + Infrastructure/Delivery Platform = “Utility Computing”

SaaS + Utility Computing = Cloud Computing.

Any thoughts?