Brave For Free

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

There’s much talk now about how the cloud is passé, and just an expensive way to send people into space really. A blog post by David Heinemeier Hansson posted some time ago about how he thinks the cloud is largely new coats of paint on old stuff and thus wants to leave it behind at once. As a practitioner who’s spent time on and off the cloud with companies large and small, these are my comments. (I got this image created by  DALL-E-2 ) Now David is no lightweight. He’s the man behind of Basecamp that millions of people use. He’s also the man behind the widely used Ruby on Rails framework that tens of millions of people use. He’s a bestselling author. He’s even an actual, certified race car driver. I’ve never written a major open-source project, and only ride bicycles past racetracks so lets be clear — I’m sniping at giants. My only defence — I’ve done some of this stuff at all kinds of scale. I’ve been born once on the cloud, spent time purely on the ground and been back and forth a