Comments for Mark Bower - Social Media meets Windows Azure

Comment on 2012 meet 2002… I think you’ll like each other by dshift

dshift — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:56:16 +0000

very right! yes same is happening with the mobile platforms for sure.
http://www.dshift.com

Comment on Official SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Blogs by stephane

stephane — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:40:16 +0000

I have created a sub site where I share a document libraries by using a web part (just to clarify I have created the webpart at the main site and insert the webpart at the sub site – works well for me).
To give read access to the document libraries into the sub site to a user, I have to set document libraries permission (read) at the main site.

Problem:
The user could eventually, by deduction, may find the main site document libraries’s link and being able to see my main site.

Do you have any recommendation to avoid this situation?

Comment on What’s the difference between Document Management and Records Management? by saidarao

saidarao — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 02:00:21 +0000

good article

Comment on Official SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Blogs by Technical Tips

Technical Tips — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:51:39 +0000

Great collection of SharePoint blogs. Thank you!

Comment on Official SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Blogs by sid

sid — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:01:52 +0000

Thanks for the list man

Comment on How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture by Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:29:30 +0000

Whats surprising is that with how new this is, there are already numerous major companies out there that are offering the private and public clouds aside from Mircrosoft Azure like Amazon, AppRiver, salesforce.com, etc. from what i can tell, this industry is so new it may only get more crowded and with new leaders. With that in mind it is difficult to design just for one provider.

Comment on How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture by Darren Strange

Darren Strange — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:00:18 +0000

Working in the Azure business now, I have had the chance to work with a few hundred partners building apps on Azure. A few things I see people getting wrong – first to Mark’s point, I see people spending huge amounts of time trying to build a cost model for their app. Now this is a good thing to do at a first iteration but this thing is hard to predict – I mean that is one of the main reasons to go to the cloud in the first place. In most cases it makes more sense to build the app with a rough idea of costs and then just, well, run it and see what it costs. To Mark’s point, this is cheaper than trying to do a modelling project with consultants. Also I see partners trying to build a monolithic app in the cloud. with the cloud you have to be more iterative, more experimental and just faster. Its no good building your first app that takes you a year and then seeing if it works. You have to think in a more iterative way. The ultimate extreme is in the social games market where companies knowingly only write 20% of the features they have planned in the first release to see if it works and how people use it. This is part of being a cloud-thinker.

Comment on How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture by Daniel McPherson

Daniel McPherson — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 06:03:35 +0000

In my maths I was looking at that $50 be cumulative, what I meant is that this becomes a “technical debt” that grows with interest along with your site.

But these are seriously complex equations, no doubt. Its also hard to talk in abstracts. I agree totally on the feature piece, also from the angle that performance and speed is a feature.

Interesting chat mate.

Comment on How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture by markbower

markbower — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:37:10 +0000

Strewth mate you were quick of the mark with that reply!
I take your points about building blocks etc, and you still need to do the right thing – you’re correct.
I would argue with your maths in the last para though. Fixing a performance issue (a bug effectively) let’s say takes 4 hours. But as we all know that’s not all the effort. You have to document, regression test, deploy, and manage the whole process. Let’s say 16 hours in total = $800. Or 16 months of an additional web server. Then multiply that by however many things (web pages, SQL queries or whatever) you are tuning. Let’s say their are 10 ‘things’ so 160 hours of effort total.
Meanwhile I could have spent that 160 hours delivering a new feature, which wins me say 1 new customer per month at say $25 a month = $300/month additional revenue by the end of year 1, and I am net up $250/month.
Do the maths with whatever bill rate you are using, but at the end of the day I think unless you are trying to build the next Twitter or Facebook our default approach for the cloud should be to focus on delivering new features quickly and not worry about spending coding cycles trying to minimise hosting costs.

Comment on How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture by Daniel McPherson

Daniel McPherson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:48:23 +0000

Hey Mark,

Interesting post, I guess there are a few things I would throw in.

Often the sorts of architecture issues which you need to design for cant be fixed by just throwing more resource at it. Or if you do they become exponential problems that get to consume a LOT of resource VERY quickly. For example bottlenecks and inappropriate use of the building blocks that make up the solution (eg. doing relational stuff with non relational stores).

Putting it another way, there is still only so much memory you can keep throwing at a memory leak.

From another angle, the scale that our solutions now need to operate could mean that the $50 you are talking about is multiplied by a very big number, and like datacentres today, your ability to compete in the market could come down to just how low you can keep your costs.

For datacentres that is people and electricity, for our applications it could very well be storage and CPU cycles.

Finally, I would rather a one off $50 payment, than the cumulative and recurring $50 cost. But agreed there is a balance there.

Anyway, just a couple of thoughts!
Daniel