Experiment in Writing

At Devscovery in New York Scott Hanselman proposed that all software developers should have a blog.  His most compelling reasons were that writing a blog would help you become a better communicator and that it’s a neat way to track what you did in the past.  That was demonstrated by some pretty comical first postings he had from back in 2002.  It’s been something I have thought about doing for a while, so that was my motivation to start.

That was the first talk, and the last talk was an introduction to Microsoft’s Live Framework and Mesh by Jeff Richter, followed by a meandering conversation about cloud computing and if it will be the next big thing.

Here are some of the questions I’d want to answer before I’d start building software on something like Mesh / Live.

1) Would I bet my business on a service that might not be around in a couple years, or might be prohibitively expensive? 

Where I work that would be called a “supplier risk” what if the provider decided to stop their product, what if they realized it was key to my business and decided to raise the price to take some of the profit margin.  It’s always a particular risk with a service, and obviously companies are already reliant on services to run internet businesses, but they’re often commodities.  Multiple companies provide essentially similar data center hosting service and compete on price, same thing for internet bandwidth etc…

2) Related to 1, it doesn’t sound like there will be an option to host my own data.  It has to be on Microsoft’s cloud.  If the cloud code was sold the supplier risk would decrease.  Independent of supplier risk I imagine that financial institutions, law firms, or medical care providers wouldn’t want or be able to trust Microsoft to host their data or to be the authentication / authorization provider.  Again that could be solved with releasing the software to build your own cloud cluster.

3) Versioning.  Is this solved already?  If Amazon upgrades their API, perhaps even fixing a bug, but somehow it breaks your code do you have the option to keep running on their old API?  I recently ran into this problem with MSFT.  They released a patch that bundled security fixes with other fixes, the one of the changes introduced a bug that broke our code.  Since we run our own environment we were able to hold off on the patch until MSFT patches their bug.  How does a cloud provider handle problems like that.  Maybe it will take a few years for problems like that to come up and shake out.