Nick Trogh is technical evangelist at Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg. He’s passionate about Microsoft technologies and cloud computing in particular. He’s reaching out to developers, IT professionals and software companies to spread the word about building software on the Microsoft application platform.
As a software company your goal is to develop great, compelling, and innovative software for your customers. The key to achieve this goal is focus. You want to focus only on those things that you’re good at, and where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. For some this means focusing on building great user experiences, for others it’s in implementing and refining an algorithm that you invented.
But think for a moment about everything that’s needed to achieve that goal of building a software product? Very often there is a backend service involved, be it for doing calculations or for storing data in a central database. This requires buying and installing some server hardware, networking gear, storage, and etcetera. Once you have all this, you go about installing an OS, web server software, a database, some system management software to monitor the environment, and so on. Once the application is up and running, your customers want it to be available at all times, which means adding more hardware and software for redundancy and maybe even disaster recovery measures are needed. And there are many more such things…
What starts as something straightforward, very quickly results in having to spend a lot of time and resources in activities which are not your core business. Just ask yourself these three questions: ‘how quickly did I get from idea to implementation’, ‘how much did I have to invest upfront before I had my first customer’ and ‘how much of your time was spent on actually building an application’. Doesn’t this remind you of an iceberg, where the small part above the waterline goes in building the application, and the hidden part is dealing with all the rest?
That is exactly what cloud computing is all about – it allows you to focus on building your application rather than keeping your application up and running. With cloud computing you have instant access to almost infinite computing resources, which you can flexibly allocate or remove as you need them, and have them available at all times. This not only gives you the flexibility to scale you application to accommodate user demand, it also gives you the agility to put a product or service in the market in no time, without having to make huge upfront investments in hardware infrastructure and operations staff.
So cloud computing can help you get rid of running and managing a server infrastructure (“iron”) in a reliable manner, at any scale, with global reach. But what about all the plumbing that goes in building an application: should you be implementing user authentication with Twitter or Facebook, should you be doing media transcoding and streaming, and what about hybrid scenarios in which you need to integrate with on-premise resources, and so on. What you really want to focus on, and which will give you an edge over your competitors, is the application business logic and design. What you’re looking at is an app-centric cloud OS that provides you with a set of application building blocks that take all plumbing out of your hands.
Building great and innovate applications requires you to focus on your key strengths, and an app-centric cloud OS can help you with that. Coming back to the iceberg metaphor: with the cloud you can turn the iceberg into a rubber duck, which floats on the water.
Already today you can get started building cloud-based applications for free and if you’re a BizSpark member, it is already part of your benefits!
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