It's getting cloudy, isn't it?

Posted on November 18, 2010 · 1 min read · tagged with: #azure #cloud

I’ve just finished the Azure workshop. In two days course you cannot get everything, but as far as I know, the discussed topics can show what Azure is all about. I won’t rewrite plenty of blog entries and articles. What I want is to write that the cloud is the future. By the cloud I do not mean Azure, I mean the paradigm allowing you to scale as hell, to manage you site performance on the very or ganic level (“too much sugar - more insulin”). There is only one danger I can imagine and it’s not the security of your data. Imagine a situation that having such a scaling environment one can improve performance of his application with scaling rather then finding a bug running a 100 additional queries in each request. I hope that programmers’ culture will evolve and will disallow such behavior.

Comments

I think the case of unoptimized, or downright performance-buggy code comes down to user experience and economy more than programmers' culture. Looking at the former, I don't think scaling in the cloud will give you a large enough all around perf boost (db, cpu, mem) to overcome any code perf issue. As for the latter, even if we assume that the cloud will be able to handle such case, it will be at the expense of computing cycles, number of connections, virtual servers etc. for which the company will have to pay.

Another thing is that, if the user doesn't notice the issue, and it's not a problem for the company - is it really an issue? Look at what happened with desktop applications during the last 20 years - is anyone missing the lack of memory and cpu optimizations that were once necessary?

by dro at 2010-12-17 15:00:03 +0000

I agree with the paradigm shift you've noticed. Today everyone says 'memory is cheap' and 'disc storage is cheap' and having your whole db in memory is perfectly fine. What I'd like to see is being informed that this cloudy thing works pretty well but this does not mean your apps will loose all of their imperfections killing performance on standard servers. Maybe it isn't the rightest message which should be sent during workshops introducing new technology, though...

Finally everything can be brought to the level of user experience and/or economy, can't it?:)

by scooletz at 2010-12-18 08:46:43 +0000

Yeah, I guess the cloud doesn't really change the underlying connection of code perf and UX/money much :)

by dro at 2010-12-30 15:26:53 +0000
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