Blog » Technology foundation

Cloud Lock-In

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:34:19 +0000

The good news with Cloud Computing is that our clients don’t have to sink precious capital into building or finding a data center or buying servers.

The bad news — at least the concern — is lock-in. Is a business locked in once they have grown? Do we have choices in case Amazon (or whoever) decides to raise their prices? Will the customers be able to take their business elsewhere if that happens?

There are a number of vendors out there providing cloud computing services:

Amazon, of course.
Rackspace
GoGrid

Others will follow. IBM has made announcements regarding Cloud Labs, Microsoft is working on Azure, etc. But I want to focus on Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid in this post. They offer services that are somewhat analogous, each has the equivalents of S3 and EC2.

All three have RESTful APIs accessible from a range of languages. They perform similar functions, yet the API for each is different. It always happens this way. the vendors are trying to compete and innovate. Lock-in is not a big consideration at this stage, maybe it will be later.

So how can we insure against lock-in? Standardization, of course. If the APIs for the three cloud vendors were the same, lock-in wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Early Stage IT serves a different market and we intend to stay focused on that market. However, if there is a venture that aims to build a standard API, as RogueWave did in its marketplace many years ago, we would be supportive partners.

For background reading, check out InfoWorld’s reviews of some cloud services.

Posted in Technology foundation, Technology Strategy Tagged: Amazon AWS, Building Web Applications, GoGrid, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, SaaS, Software as a Service

Web Sites with Social Networking

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:33:53 +0000

So you want to build a web site with social networking as one of its components? You can start with a social networking foundation and build a web site around it, or you can start with a web site content management solution and add social networking to it.

My purpose in this post is to gather the ingredients — the pasta and the sauce, if you will — and leave the preparation for another post. The assumption here is that the basic web site is the pasta and social networking is the sauce. Of course, it could be the other way round, depending on your business.

The most important thing is to be able to integrate the two parts.

Content Management

Content Management has been around longer and is more stable. Ric Shreves did a comprehensive study of the solutions in this space last summer. His conclusion: the top 3 systems are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Wikipedia’s list of content management systems is more exhaustive but less evaluative in its approach. My key take-away here is that the top 3 CMS systems are all based on PHP. That settles the programming language wars as far as I am concerned.

Social Networking

Here is a quick summary of technology solutions relative to social networking:

Wikipedia Entry on Social Networking.
About 120 social networking web sites. Are you sure you need your own? Shouldn’t you think about hanging your functionality as an application on one (or several) of these?
Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. 34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. Also see included tables in both of these articles. They are both about 18 months old, which is about 40 years in internet time, but still a wealth of information. Among sites that deserve special consideration:
- Ning.
- CrowdVine, great for event planning.
- GoingOn, greate for building communities.
Drupal vs Joomla. He picks Joomla but makes a case for Drupal as a better base engine, IMO. Another Drupal vs Joomla article.
The Drupal site.

Finally, the startup factor. What’s the solution that is commandeering startup money? I searched venture sites Xconomy and YouNoodle, looking for startups using the technologies mentioned above. The conclusion: Drupal (3½, Acquia, GoingOn, SocialActions(½), Halosys), WordPress(2, PayBox and Insoshi) and Joomla(0).

So what do we recommend? That’s another discussion because it depends on the requirements.

Posted in Technology foundation Tagged: Content Management, Social Networking

Dynamic Source Code Control

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:19:49 +0000

We have implemented DynamSoft’s SourceAnywhere Hosted as our source control system.

Since our business model calls for being able to assemble teams and have them become productive very quickly, having a SaaS source code control system was very important to us. SourceAnywhere allows us the flexibility to expand our network on short order.

During our evaluation process, we looked into a number of tools. In the end, the factors that won us over to DynamSoft were

Its Eclipse integration and
The ease of setup.

Most source code control systems integrate with Eclipse but setup can be a bear. We do a lot of development in Python. Some of the source control tools are built using Python as well — as Murphy would have it, they were different. We had to make sure the library versions of our code didn’t inadvertently intermingle with the library versions of the source control system. Setting up Dynamsoft’s solution was 1-2-3 by comparison.

No software development team can afford mishaps in source control. It has to just work. SourceAnywhere does that for us.

Posted in Technology foundation Tagged: SaaS, Software as a Service, Source Control