Retooling for the Cloud

To truly utilize the new paradigm of cloud computing’s scalable architecture, developers need to rethink their application design from the ground up.  To leverage the lower cost of on-demand scalability (ability to scale only when needed) of cloud IaaS, applications need to be designed to run on multiple systems and assume that there are multiple implementations of that function doing the same thing.  Requiring a single instance of a class or function be running at a time eliminates scalability and introduces a single point of failure.

Traditional applications developed 10 years ago are going to have difficulty moving to the cloud.  SAP is offering to deploy an instance for companies on AWS but in my opinion this may be a last gasp for life from a dying platform.  This is a good article that points out why I don’t think we will see traditional enterprise ERP, CRM and manufacturing vendors easily move their stuff to the cloud.  

References

• Why Enterprise Software will hit a Wall when Moving to the Cloud

- Chris Claborne