Microsoft’s Azure is worth taking a look at if your going to venture into the world of Cloud Computing.

So much as been written and said over the past year about Cloud Computing.  Every major software company, consulting company, and technology company has entered their respective rings to announce how much they know and can help with cloud computing.  This is the same type of hype that happened 5-10 years ago around SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).  Just like the hype around SOA, the hype around Cloud will eventually subside as people realize the truth.

I never got into the SOA hype because I never felt there was anything worth getting excited about.  In my opinion, SOA was just a new name for an approach to building systems that many of us had been doing for years.  Sure, there was some advances in the underlying technologies, some new standards defined and implemented to facilitate interoperability, and better management tooling; but at the end of the day the idea of creating services that are reusable and deployed on an application tier was far from revolutionary.

As with SOA, the latest hype around Cloud Computing is a bit much.  If you look at what cloud computing means to a business, it means being able to access applications “in the cloud”.  Well, that just sounds a lot like an ASP (Application Service Provider) or Outsourcing to me. Fifteen years ago I worked for a company were we hosted and operated a enterprise application for other companies.  They accessed the application over some T1’s and VPN.  Today they would just access over the Internet.  What will be different with a “cloud application” than with those applications 15 years ago?  Not much I don’t think.  To the end customer I think that Cloud Computing is all hype and nothing new.  The biggest change that cloud computing involves is around application development tools and technologies, and also with the capabilities of the cloud providers. 

Amazon and Microsoft are both heavily invested in cloud computing and enabling their respective platforms for developers and others to take advantage of.  The benefit is around the “on demand” features of the platform.  This allows consumers to pay for what they use and can better handle spikes in processing requirements.  In the “old days” a hosting provider would gather the processing requirements from the customer and then size the environment to handle the peak processing.  The customer would end up paying for all the processing capacity even though some/much was idle most of the time.  With cloud computing that changes and consumers will only have to pay for what they use.  This is a good thing, but hardly what I would consider to be revolutionary.

I’ve been using Wordpress as a blogging platform for a few years now. It’s an awesome blogging tool. Up until last week I never thought of Wordpress as anything more than just a blogging platform, but last week I started looking into how to create my own Wordpress template and discovered that Wordpress is so much more than just a blogging platform.

Wordpress provides a framework that can be used to create dynamic web sites that look like a “normal” (i.e., non-blog) web site.  One of the benefits of using Wordpress is that it already provides great administrative tools and the ability to quickly add new pages and posts, as well as modifying existing content. Then there’s the list of plugins available and great SEO capabilities.

My first foray into using Wordpress for a real website has been converting my Flintvalley.com web site over to Wordpress.  It only took me a couple of days, and that included the time I spent reading and learning about the Wordpress framework.  While the site is operational (which is obvious since your reading this on the site :)), I still have some work to do on it. There’s just so many features available from Wordpress that it will take me a while to really grasp all of the possibilities and put them to work.  I’ve also started to migrate a few other sites I have over to Wordpress.