I mentioned in my previous post that there are only five reasons to move to the cloud. Number one on that list is flexibility . (Image generated as usual by DALL-E-2) Everyone tells you the cloud will give us a lot of flexibility; that you can dance there in a way it cannot do on-premise (and not just because you’re a paunchy middle-aged man). Scale up, scale down, clone, snapshot, change your mind whenever you like, no long-term contracts, no fear of irrevocable errors — flexibility, what’s not to love? While you’re getting caught up in all the sexiness though, it is important to ask one key question. Why can’t your elephants dance? (By this, I mean to ask, of course, why your on-premise is not flexible -no actual elephants are involved) It’s not a trivial question. For a while now, most enterprises have virtualised infrastructure not very dissimilar from the cloud, and hence many of the technological barriers to flexibility (attached storage disks, physical servers etc) have long si
A few days ago I gave sage commentary on leaving the cloud . Today, it's about going into the cloud instead. Image generated by MidJourney I’ve been living with my head in the clouds for a long time now. As a fledgling startup from before AWS, I could only look on in envy as a cohort of youngsters flashed a credit card and pulled in computing power I had to spend months and millions with IBM to get just a handful of years ago, This got me deeply into the cloud, and my next few startup-ish attempts made me no money, but did teach me a lot about how to ignore IBM. A History Lesson I’ve worked with companies that were not startups but benefited greatly from the move to the cloud in selected areas. The first was Indiainfoline, a decade ago India’s largest broker and struggling mightily with its hyper-growth. We put — not the core, but a very essential and troublesome service on the cloud — email. Remember, a decade ago email was the collaboration lifeblood of a company, and constant p