Simon G's Blog

I’ve spent a bit of time at the CIO Summit  in Auckland over the past couple of days and below is a synopsis from the sessions I attended. Key overall themes Digital Transformation (DX) is still a key focus of organisations, with cultural change being one of the most fundamental shifts. Increased use of Cloud/“as a Service” models is prevalent across most organisations. Customer-centricity as opposed to other models such as Product-centric. Connections & ecosystems (internal and external to organisations) is key to DX, with APIs being a key enabler. Smart use of data is becoming increasingly important to drive great customer experiences. Further detail Trends & Insights “The 3rd platform is the key to creating new value” IDG Mobility, Big Data/Analytics, Cloud, Social “By 2020, over 2/3 of Enterprise IT and software spending will be for cloud-based offerings” IDG “70% of CIOs have a cloud first strategy” IDG “By 2019, 42% of IoT data will be process...

“ Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud ” by George Reese is more of an Amazon EC2 and S3 user manual than covering Cloud Application Architecture in general. Having said that I did find that it still did have some good content although in many areas it was very high level.  Some diagrams were also missing from my copy. There was a good Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services overview.  Cloud ROI, Monitoring & Management, and reiteration that Laws need to be considered were also covered, as were development implications, and in particular multiple-server transaction management. If you want an overview of Amazon Web Services, EC2 and S3 then this book may be right for you.

Even a few years ago when buying a computer I was only concerned that it would run a Microsoft OS and that I could put a small Linux partition on it too. The thought of buying an Apple Mac never even crossed by mind. A key consideration used to always be that there were lots of applications I wanted to run and that in general they were only built to run on the Microsoft OS. In today's world however I no longer think this is the case. Sure there are some apps that are only built to run on one Operating System, but with more and more services moving into the cloud, the Web browser is increasingly becoming the key application many people use. For servers the Operating System has a larger role to play, but for standard consumer computing it is less important. Platforms such as Adobe AIR and JRE are also aiding this shift away from the Operating System being so important. These platforms are enabling the ability for applications to be written once and run easily on multiple Opera...