Head for the sky

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Looks like this people are still interested in my opinion on Cloud Computing! Alexandra Cain has written an article in the December edition of CFO Magazine, following on from an interview she did with me.

My comments follow on from my experiences implementing a new hosting environment and a SaaS based Anti-SPAM solution at work.

If you had read some of my previous comments about cloud computing, you will remember one of my bug bears is the lack if tools available from cloud vendors for IT Pros to work out how much resource their on premise app uses and hence what resources would be consumed in the cloud and at what cost.

At a recent Microsoft event for Web Devs, I was very please to learn that one of the pricing options being rolled out in March for Azure was a subscription model, where you can purchase X amount of compute power for $Y. At least this helps IT Managers know how much a month they are spending on Azure.

It still not allowing us to reap the cost benefits of the cloud though - certainly not the upside of it anyway. May be a capped plan similar to mobile plans might be a way to go?

At the event, the speaker was asked if there were any tools for Azure to determine the required compute power required for a existing on-premise app to move into the cloud. Alas, the speaker admitted there were none currently available for Azure. And don't get me started on the need for comparison tools across the various cloud platforms...

So it's still an emerging technology, but there no doub cloud computing is going to stay and change howe we do things.

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