To cloud or not to cloud

In the past two weeks, two persons separately came to me asking me about taking their businesses to the cloud. And my first answer was "How has your system performed outside the cloud?".

There are indeed many reasons to cloud but one good reason not to cloud is trying to do it because the topic seems to be a big buzz on the internet.

It is quite a sad new but the recent failure of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) will again throw more questions on exactly how are we supposed to go about "cloud"ing our businesses.

Considering a situation where a client doing a non-internet business is having her entire system in the cloud. The advantages of such are well numbered but downtimes like this could really suck. Therefore, I will advise company who must go cloud (because of the well numbered advantages) never to put their life entirely in the cloud but keep a copy in their hands as well. This would mean local copies. But can we have local copies of cloud services?

This in itself brings up the issue of service and data synchronization. And of course, unless we have to completely take faith in our cloud company, is another big science which we will all one day need to answer.

Happy Easter.

LONG TIME NO PHP

It is more than 5 years ago I did a medium-scale project in PHP and coming back this time to lay my hands on the language again really tells how fast time flies. Varieties of Content Management Systems (CMS) were available for work. In 2005, I was only privy to systems like Mambo, Joomla and Drupal and PHP frameworks like Zend and cakePHP. Now, I cannot count how many such frameworks that exist on the internet.

The most noticeable change in the language for me was the standard OOP feature that was built into the language. Back then in 2004/2005, my knowledge of java got in the way of building OO classes in PHP, though I built many of my components in OO fashion. Now the OOP in PHP in my opinion is mature and can allow for wide-scale flexibility in the language. It is even more lovely to see that I could build php codes with my favourite used-to-be-only-java IDE - Netbeans.

Now I know I got more to learn because PHP is ever more powerful. Combining such power with AJAX has made the web what it is today. I most run now as I have so much to cover about this beautiful language.

I am the worst blogger there is....

Yes this is true: I was just in my bathroom today when I asked myself "when was the last time you blogged".. and I thought to myself.."surely like years ago..

Officially, I am the worst blogger there is on planet earth and I accept that in good faith. I am hoping to change because for real, there is a lot to blog about software (java, oracle, bi and databases, web development, python, php and soa), music, history, travels and my countries national election. Yes, I am officially back and don't hope to stay away for such a record time.

Good to be back/