Your Cloud Provider Is Not The Boss

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Peter Waterhouse.

As an impoverished student I owned an old car. By today’s standards it was basic. It had no air conditioning or cup holders and it rusted continuously. Being broke meant I had to perform my own maintenance, which I wasn’t especially good at. But that aside, when I lifted the hood after a breakdown I could normally see and fix the problem. I could repair a damaged hose, change spark plugs, and if I was feeling adventurous, adjust carburettor settings. Sure it burned a lot of oil and the mileage was terrible, but it got me around.

Today in IT, and just like with new cars, if we look under the hood we are confronted with something very different: mass complexity. Worse still, some of it we can’t see. So even if we want to do some "tech mechanics," we can’t because we’ve lost our essential tools: visibility and control. It’s no wonder then that just like with new and advanced cars, we feel less inclined to lift the IT hood. Think about it: how many times have you looked under the hood on the car you now drive? Once, twice, ever?…

So why would you look under the hood of IT when advanced cloud platforms are proving their value over and over again? And like great new cars, isn’t cloud computing engineered from the ground up to support all the greatest gadgets – like mobile devices and social computing? Surely, too, doesn’t the scale and standardization provided by service providers (the auto shop if you will) always ensure your tank is refilled and your spark plugs changed automatically? And even provide the PaaS smarts needed to keep your passengers (no offence to developers) amused on the journey? So maybe we don’t need to look under the hood after all. Well — yes and no…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/your-cloud-provider-is-not-the-boss/240163222