07/01/2010 01:21:23 PM EST

The development vs operations conversation is interesting, and from experience, really falls into the objective of the software being created. For an application that is run for a relatively small-to-moderate set of users and/or is going to have modest use, there's not much need to re-engineer it for the cloud, outside of optimizing its memory/processor/load functionality, which should be an ongoing objective anyway. Its migration to the cloud might purely be characterized as setting up the application on a virtual server "floating around" within a cloud provider. This becomes purely an operational issue. If one is in the ASP business, usually a separate instance of the application will be spun up per customer with separate upgrade cycles applied, essentially a "one instance per customer" model. A nice bonus of using this approach is it does allow for on-premise deployment when required by regulations and/or privacy requirements. Some have proposed, however, that a true cloud application will run as a single ongoing instance, supporting multiple and perhaps unlimited customers, on essentially one piece of core code. A code update for one customer is a code update for all customers. Some things change under this paradigm. Security design becomes more of a challenge, as each customer might have their own set of administration features that must be completely isolated from other customers (something that's automatic in other "separate installation per customer scenarios"). How file objects are retrieved (and perhaps objects in general) also becomes more complex as the single instance application must support save and retrieval of millions if not billions of file objects itself. A simple dedicated file server scenario won't scale under a "one instance for all" cloud model. That's where things like Azure come in, which have their own APIs developers must become familiar with. As software vendors plan out their offerings, picking "one instance per customer" or "one instance for all" will have a drastic impact on how their software utilizes the cloud. And potential customers should ask their vendors which approach they have elected to take. Paul Katz Chief Software Architect LimeLeap Solutions

United StatesPaul Katz