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So what do you when your wide awake at 2:30 in the morning while the rest of the house is sound asleep? You whip out your tablet and go play in the cloud if you are a psuedo techno geek.
My toy, excuse me my tool happens to be a iPad 2. As the tablet market continues to introduce cheaper products I can see having different flavors of toys. I have friends who have no problems justifying spending the equivalent of a cheap tablet on a bottle of wine. I will save the headache and buy a droid or Win 8 tablet when the time is right. For now I’m thrilled that I have yet to encounter too many obstacles that prevent this cool toy from being a productive tool.
So I was catching up on my email and I got a great request:
“John-
I’d like to proceed with setting up a west coast replicant and PROD-SAS server at the OpSource San Jose Cloud.”
Yes I know if you don’t have your decoder ring you don’t have a clue what this gibberish means. What he is requesting in that one sentence is for IPI to setup an slave instance of their production database in an alternate cloud facility that houses their master instance of their database. In addition he is requesting that we implement a SAS server in the west coast facility to mitigate the latency of the SF bay area users accessing the SAS data sets that are in the east coast facility located in Virginia.
Now to be fair I will disclose we had discussed these topics in a 5 minute phone conversation previously.
So I log into the cloud provider’s web based admin UI and create a cloud network in the west coast with 3 clicks and a few keystrokes for the description.
I then start the export of the database server image on the East coast cloud. All just using Safari on the iPad so nothing too daring yet.
I then create a virtual Windows 2008 server temporarily to use as nothing more than a computer I can remotely log into using RDP to export and import the images between the two cloud facilities but staying within the cloud environment.
5 minutes later (1 minute of effort) for the server to be completely built, I securely connect to the network I just deployed using Cisco’s SSL/VPN AnyConnect product. This is a free app for the iPad. I log into the server I just built using another free app that allows you to RDP with the iPad.
Now all of these cool things I did in a matter of minutes hopefully not just illustrate the power of the cloud from a technology standpoint, but more impressing to me is how it can change the solution delivery process. Not that you can’t make mistakes in the cloud but you can undo and adjust in a fraction of the time it takes going through a waterfall development process.