May 09, 2015

Jumping into the Cloud

TL;DR Why develop for the cloud, intro to future posts.

Let’s say, for some reason, you are interested in Cloud Architecture and you want to sky dive.

Why?

Pain? Perhaps you have a traditional enterprise application or service collection that has become so big, it can’t move under its own weight. Your silos of expertise (DBAs vs server devels vs front end devels vs Ops) are creating bottlenecks that are killing feature delivery. Your tooling is nearly a decade old and you wonder if something new could improve your situation.

Quality? Perhaps you want to transform your organization to one with higher product quality, reduced delivery cycles, higher confidence in your ability to consistently deliver features, better monitoring, and better availability,

Feature delivery? Perhaps you realize that you need to optimize your development center for speed instead of efficiency so your company can remain competitive. Efficiency implies monolithic infrastructures and silos of expertise that become delivery bottlenecks. It also implies significant investment in a single technology that must be used everywhere to justify the cost which introduces technology bottlenecks. E.g. You have a significant Oracle investment so every data store must be a row based relational database instead of a data store perfectly suited to your task. You have reached what seems like a limit for Old School Enterprise Architecture and wonder if a different approach will help you reach the next level.

Personal Growth? Or, maybe you just want to play with the tools that all the cool kids are playing with. Or, you just want to jump into a more vibrant development community. Maybe just build your resume so you remain relevant in the industry.

The reason doesn’t really matter – only that you are motivated and looking for something new.

The first step is setting up your computer to easily install and tear down new technologies. This lets you easily explore new technologies and establishes fundamental concepts that you will use in the cloud.

These first articles will guide you through initial local machine setup with core technologies. They are bite sized and ordered to provide a platform from which we can explore new technologies and eventually migrate these to different cloud providers.

Note: These bare-bones installation instructions are meant to get a technology installed and provide one working example. There are many great tutorials out there that provide much more depth; these simple instructions provide the depth we need today and a jumping in point to other articles for the interested reader.