Page 150 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

it is going to have to align its skills with the requirements of
the new paradigm.
Even organizations that are openly contemplating using
the public cloud will find that there is a need to keep many ap-
plications and much data in house. If use of the public cloud
takes root, there will be a new coordination problem between

its workloads and those applications that are still in-house. In-
deed, one of the first new skills that IT will need to develop
will be the ability to decide which application goes where.
As Norrod indicated, the early adopters are shipping
“noncritical” workloads to the public cloud, those that are not
essential to the day-to-day operation of the business. The soft-
ware development team has a voracious appetite for resources,

particularly as it nears completion of a major new application.
The software must be tested in the environment in which it is
to run. It must be tested with the other pieces of software on
which it will depend once it’s placed into day-to-day operation
or “production.” It must be tested against all the possible vari-
ables and combinations of events that might occur in the soft-
ware stack to see if any part of it fails.
Thousands of tests chew up CPU cycles on dozens or hun-
dreds of servers. Development teams are frequently forced to

borrow some servers and acquire others in a larcenous man-
ner (begging, borrowing, stealing) to meet their testing needs.
It’s the only way that they can work out the kinks and bugs in
their software before it goes into production, as finding such
problems belatedly carries a heavy business cost. Testing is an
ideal job to ship out to the cloud, where there will be no short-

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