The American futurist Alvin Toffler once said – “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. I think it is particularly true to those of us working in the Information Technology industry, as every two three years we need to unlearn some buzzwords, and relearn some buzzwords.
However, Cloud Computing are not buzzwords. Therefore, it is important for us to unlearn the previous know-how and relearn the new new things – the new way to design, implement, test, operate and monitor Cloud based IT systems. And one of the best ways to go thru this unlearn and relearn this cycle is to attend the Amazon’s AWS Summit.
One of the key learnings of in the Summit is you can auto-scale the IT systems. In the past few years, no matter who you talked to – salesperson, developers, architects etc., they would all tell you how great it was that you could easily scale up your Cloud based IT system when the system was under heavy loadings (for example, in peak hours of sales period, or festive seasons). Seems to me all they need is to scale up, all of them are very optimistic about their businesses !!
However, the true beauty of the Cloud system is in fact the ability of scaling down, not up, the Cloud based IT system. In other words, we shall design our system that based on certain business and technical criteria, the system can scale up to cater for the extra loading, and scale down to save cost.
In other words, the Cloud system is no longer a fixed architecture, but it will grow or shrink the computing power in line with the businesses. And it will cost more when the business is good, and less when the business is slow. Finally IT becomes part of the business.
Another key learning is the product life cycle that encourages innovation and idea trial. Unlike previous IT set up, now you can implement a basic computing architecture in the cloud in minutes. And you can close down that same architecture in seconds. That flexibility helps us to test drive any idea with ease, and with low cost barrier.
Amazon proposes a life cycle of :
Idea -> MVP -> Scale -> Profitability
(where MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product)
In other words, start with your brilliant but untested idea, build a MVP with minimal computing architecture. When it is a good idea to pursuit further, scale up quickly. Then reap the profit with as little computing power you need as possible.
So, if you missed the AWS Summit 2013 Singapore, and want to unlearn quicker and relearn more … Don’t miss the next AWS re:Invent 2013.
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 