The promise of cloud computing is the ability to scale to meet any demand level almost instantly, saving money along the way by only ever needing the power available that is required now. To do this it uses a combination of virtualisation and grid-based clustering technology. The potential is enormous. To spice it up further then by using a platform such as Gigaspace it is possible to improve performance and scalability to a degree that thousands of transactions a second are possible, based on in-memory database technology. Continue reading ‘Should you be looking at clouds?’ »
Posts tagged ‘hype’
I have recently read with interest various Gartner hype-cycle reports. There is an example here, and here is wikkipedia’s comment on it. The idea is fairly simple, and based on the adjustment trend that new technology tends to go through towards gaining mainstream adoption. Once a technology is started it tends to gain an undeserved (according to its current capability) reputation to be the best thing that will save the world. As this continues people realise it actually has some limitations, and so it loses credibility rapidly. The story then continues as people realise that it is useful, even with its limitations, and so the reputationbuild again. To anyone that has been around a bit none of this is news. Continue reading ‘The Hype Cycle’ »
It would seem that “Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) is taking off as a technology in fashion. As usual, most of the news is generated by people wanting to sell it as the next big thing ready for the prime time. If followed as it is being sold at present, the concept is liable to lead to significant performance problems. SOA is sold on having a large number of “users” who are then often other systems. This is followed all the way back to the real users through an unknown number of tiers. The complexity of managing this sort of architecture increases significantly as the number of tiers increases. If this is then managed without due consideration for managing the system capacity and performance the result will be problems in the future. That is not to say that I don’t see a benefit in the overall technology – there is great potential. Just consider carefully how the performance of operational systems might be proven to be sufficient for the long term.
