I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Use cloud to create focus
I feel slightly guilty as I write this article - but only slightly. I’m typing this on an old Macbook Air, and every now and then it reminds me that I haven’t backed up the hard drive for nearly a year. Whenever it does that, I feel a twinge of guilt - and then I dismiss the reminder.
The reason that I only feel slightly guilty is that it’s been a long time since that reminder mattered. I started making the shift from local storage to Cloud storage a few years back, and started making the shift from locally installed applications to Cloud based applications a year or so ago. While I’m typing this on a Macbook Air, I’m using Google Docs on a Chrome browser - and could be doing that on a range of devices.
Thinking differently about . . . cloud
I will always associate the concept of Cloud with a view of the Thames. That’s what I could see on the day when the Cloud light bulb first began to flicker on in my head. One of my colleagues had arranged for the CTO of a Cloud company (not the one I work for today) to visit us, and he was explaining how his company had built their platform to support their own business. I started to realise how Cloud differed from traditional enterprise infrastructure and why I, as a technology architect, needed to pay attention.
As promised, this article is one of a series on how I learnt to think differently about key concepts in enterprise computing, written in the hope that they may be useful to people on the same journey. Before we go further on Cloud, though, I should declare that I work for a Cloud company (Google), but that the views in this article are my own. I should also say that I work for a Cloud company because I believe in the value of Cloud, not the other way round.