Continuing our discussion on "Personal Cloud" technology from last week, I had a chance to catch up with ZDNet/BriefingsDirect analyst Dana Gardner, whom we also ran into at the most recent HP Software Universe event in Las Vegas.
In his latest blog: "The Cloud Gets Up Close and Personal," Dana was particularly interested in virtualization and Cloud Computing in terms of freeing up developers from dependencies and costs by replicating the target environment on their local workstation, a capability which is entirely possible today:
"The confluence of SaaS and cloud with application development and the test phase is changing rapidly..." he observed. "Compressing the test phase into the development and production becomes more feasible. And as virtualization becomes more common, building an application or service in its own runtime stack bubble from inception to sunset starts to make sense..."
Indeed, we feel that ANYTHING you can do to eliminate waiting on incomplete environments, unavailable systems, unexpected costs and fees, all of those things are what we need to solve if we are going to really see the value we expect from today's distributed, flexible kinds of apps -- which will likely lean heavily on the Cloud as a deployment strategy.
Having a personal-size development environment is almost as popular with developers as say, a personal-size pizza. And in terms of the costs IT departments currently must spend to enable robust test environments, the cost to the business can now seem as small as adding one topping to that personal pizza. He quoted me from the briefing:
"First, the developer working on a cloud application is free to work
anywhere, anytime regardless of whether the real cloud services are
available or accessible. If a cloud service for a shopping cart is down
for some reason, developers are not impacted since their version of the
service is on their laptop. They can also code when they are on a
plane, or in another environment with no access to the cloud.
Second, although this is probably first in the minds of budget
conscious IT managers, the developer is not running up charges for
accessing the cloud services..." [Chris Kraus, iTKO]
Now, this sounds great. But what are the unaddressed frontiers of such an approach? Well, for one thing, Dana is looking for the whole package coming out of it:
"...while we’re combining all the elements of an application and platform from cradle to grave, why not tune the whole package before, during and after development too … then load the entire package as a portable cloud-supported production unit?
Now, that’s a “personal” cloud (I prefer cloud service nodule), but with high service performance output, and far less time in cost in the total lifecycle. Higher overall quality too. What do you think?"
We like it - however with critical deployed systems, even if they are very well tested before they are packaged and deployed by the developer, you still MUST test continuously in deployment, as all of the components and usage patterns the developer needed to have stable on the desktop, may not be so stable or used in known ways in Cloud deployment. We can get most of the way there, but probably not 100% there, as much as I'd like to be proven wrong someday.
In addition we will still see these efforts put into Public and Private Cloud environments, due to the ease of administration and economy of scale benefits of provisioning shared "anytime/anywhere" environments for the software lifecycle.
I do believe we will continue to see innovation in this realm - the personal cloud or "local virtualized" environment enabling multiple individuals and teams to work in parallel - married to next-generation application packaging and deployment options. Indeed there are already some nice technologies out there, which we will discuss with partners in future posts.
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