DaedTech

Stories about Software

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An Introduction to the Types of Cloud Computing

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Monitis blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look around at some of their other authors and content.

The folks at Gartner have something awesome called the “hype cycle”.  The cycle contains a “peak of inflated expectations” and a “trough of disillusionment”.  So, that alone gives it a pretty significant amusement factor.

But beyond the amusement lies an important insight into our collective psychology.  Those of us working in tech work in a booming and constantly evolving industry.  Because of this, we find ourselves bombarded with buzzwords.  These generate excitement at first and disillusionment later.  Eventually, they reach equilibrium.

Gartner uses this set of observations to advise companies about risk.  But we can use it to identify a term’s likelihood to induce buzzword fatigue and produce derisive satire.

Let’s get specific.  Do you remember a few years back, when “X as a service” really took off?  The world seized on the promise of the cloud.  Don’t maintain it yourself — have a service do it!  As the term rocketed up the peak of inflated expectations, everyone wanted a part of the cloud.

But then it fell into the trough of disillusionment, and satire ensued.  Twitter accounts offered “sarcasm as a service” to poke fun at the hype.  If you saw an offering for “everything as a service,” you had no idea whether it was serious.

Since this time, however, these offerings have ascended the so-called “slope of enlightenment” and established themselves as mainstream.  Actually, let me correct that.  They have established themselves as foundational to the modern internet.

Let’s now unpack this X as a service concept a bit.  In order to do that, I’ll offer a story in contrasts.

The “As a Service” Concept

Imagine that I own a small business.  In this capacity, I want to keep track of prospects, leads, and customers for sales purposes.  You can think of this as “customer relationship management” (CRM) software.

Back in the early days of my career (late 90s, early 2000s), you might have done this with Excel.  At least, you would have used Excel until it became too unwieldy.  Then, you’d have gone to Best Buy and purchased software that you installed from a CD.  Finally, you’d have installed the “client” on anyone’s PC who needed to use it while installing the “server” on some jack of all trades machine running Windows 2000 or something.  From there, using it was as easy as making sure not too many people tried to change things at once.

Fast forward a couple of decades and that seems… odd.  These days, you’d probably just navigate to something like salesforce.com and create a trial account.  Certainly small business owners would take this approach.  Larger organizations with more privacy concerns might still setup servers and install their own software.  But even the ones doing this would probably host a web app and have “clients” access it via browser.

This tale drives at the essence of “as a service.”  Stuffed into that small phrase, you find the large, important concept of “let someone else worry about it.”  You shouldn’t need to think about clients, servers, networks, and the like to have a CRM system.  Let someone else worry about it.  You just want to sign in via the browser.

This concept has become so important and so ubiquitous that it drives today’s internet.  But not all cloud, “as a service” concepts are created equal.  Let’s take a look at the major types of cloud computing, by conceptual level.

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Choosing Among Text Editors and IDEs

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Monitis blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look at their offerings for monitoring all of your production concerns and infrastructure.

Few subjects in programming can get as contentious as quickly as, “what should I use to edit my code?”  Before you even get to the subject of “which one,” vigorous debates emerge over “what kind?”  This cordial Quora question with roughly 6 billion answers serves as an example of this.  Text editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE)?

Only after that perilous decision do you arrive at the “which one debate.”  So furious has this debate proved that Wikpedia has an “Editor War” entry.  It describes the choice between the Emacs and VI editors.  The usage of “war” is a joke.  But only kind of.

So against this backdrop, you might regard the choice as one fraught with peril.  Pick incorrectly and risk the scorn of your peers.  That’s a joke.  But only kind of.

Fortunately, for the purposes of guidance, at least, I count myself a pragmatist mercenary.  In other words, I come from the relatively small camp of software developers without much strong preference about any of it.  I have spent years with each of the following: Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Emacs, Pico, Nano, Scite, SublimeText and Notepad++.  And I’m probably forgetting some.  All have their perks and foibles, but I prefer to keep my options open and let context guide me.

So, face with the need to pick new tooling, how should you handle it?  Today, I’ll offer some advice on heuristics for selecting an IDE or text editor.

Make a Quick List of Your Needs

First things first.  Do what you would do when contemplating any sort of consumer decision.  Make a list of your needs and wants.

For instance, say you were buying a refrigerator.  You’d need a certain size to fit your space, and you’d need a certain amount of storage capacity.  You might then want a chrome finish and an ice maker.  Contemplate the tool you’ll use for writing code in this same fashion, for starters.  You may have non-negotiable needs around operating system and programming language, and more fluid wants around features.

But also bear in mind context.  For example, do you specifically need a tool to work on one specific project at the office?  Or do you want something versatile that you’ll use everywhere, across various languages and technologies?

Now, combine these two lines of thinking and you will probably have narrowed the field considerably.  And you need to narrow the field, since a surprisingly daunting number of options exist out there.  Easier to choose among 2 or 3 than from hundreds.

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How to Write Code that Operations Will Like

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Monitis blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look around at the options you have for monitoring your production site and all of its supporting infrastructure.

In recent years, the DevOps movement has gained a significant amount of steam.  Historically, organizations approached software creation and maintenance in the same way that they might with physical, mechanical process such as manufacturing.  This meant carving the work into discrete components and then asking people to specialize in those components.

If you picture a factory floor, it becomes easy to picture.  One person screws two components together over and over, while another person operates a drill press over and over.  When you specialize this way, the entire process gains in efficiency.  At least, so it goes with mechanical processes.

With knowledge work, we haven’t realized the same kind of benefit.  In retrospect, this makes sense.  It makes sense because, unlike mechanical work, knowledge work involves little true repeatability.  It continually presents us with problems that differ at least somewhat.

As we’ve come to recognize that fact, we’ve begun to blend concerns together.  Scrum teams blur the lines among QA, developers, and business analysts.  And DevOps does the same with initial development and production operation of software.  If you can, I wholeheartedly encourage you to embrace DevOps and to blend these concerns.  Your entire work product will improve.

Unfortunately, not every shop can do this — at least not immediately.  Progress goes slowly in these places because of regulatory and compliance concerns or perhaps because change can come slowly in the enterprise.  But that shouldn’t stop you from making strides.

Even if development and operations remain separate, they can at least communicate and help each other.  Today, I’d like to talk about how developers can write code that makes life easier for ops folks.

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