What is cloud computing?
This is a personal remembrance. More than ten years ago, when I was the sole DBA at Texas CHIP, I remember an idea I had. I told my manager, Jeff, about it, and several other people.
In a nutshell, it was an idea for "Oracle at the end of a network cable". I thought about a company that just did Oracle databases for clients, and handled almost everything except the content of the database. All the intricate and crazy structures of databases were in the background, deliberately hidden from the customer.
Customers would tell us merely what they wanted to do, and we would make it happen, like magic. No technical knowledge on the part of the customer required. The customers would access their database via an Internet URL. At the time, I thought they would want to retain their front-end developers in-house, so the idea was just about databases.
That was somewhere around 2002 - 2003. Amazon started AWS in 2005. In a way, I conceived of the idea of cloud computing before Amazon started offering AWS. I never pursued it, because at the time, I still had both an employee mindset and an engineer mindset. No bragging possible here, I didn't do it. It was just a thought that I had, and talked about.
With that thought, I had anticipated a whole industry, and a mighty one. Think about that. I missed a fortune.
Had I pursued it, even incompetently, I might have been able to build something I could have sold for a lot of money. But at the time, I thought the idea impractical, and I had better things to do (I was married, with children on the way).
At the time, companies with a development IT staff thought in terms of making their own programs, usually out of Visual Basic or some other programming platform. Giant scale web development with Java was an up-and-coming technology, looked upon with suspicion by managers.
Now, all of this has been supplanted with new technologies that allow you to create entire development stacks in your own dev box (I know, I just made one), including the back-end database. You can do more now by yourself in a day than my whole team accomplished in a year. Breath-taking!
The take-away from this story is as old as time, but very relevant: ordinary people come up with extraordinary ideas, often. That they don't pursue them, full-tilt boogie, is a tragedy. My poor brain was not aligned with the tremendous task of bringing one of my ideas to market, fast. I couldn't do it, folks.
I am different now, and I am taking my ideas to market as fast as I can. You are now reading the results.
Don't talk about your good ideas. Write them down. Assess what is stopping you from immediately taking the idea to the market, where you can test it in real conditions and in real time. Continue to develop it until it either pays off or falls into dust. Rinse and repeat.
Your mind will undergo significant change in the process, as will your heart. It's worth it - your ideas, crazy or not, can have significant value. Failures will be part of the minefield you navigate as you do this.
Remember the story of J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. She is now a billionaire. When she started, she was a poor, single mum on public assistance.
I encourage all of you to have respect for the ideas you generate. Maybe they won't turn out, but, importantly, maybe they will!
In a nutshell, it was an idea for "Oracle at the end of a network cable". I thought about a company that just did Oracle databases for clients, and handled almost everything except the content of the database. All the intricate and crazy structures of databases were in the background, deliberately hidden from the customer.
Customers would tell us merely what they wanted to do, and we would make it happen, like magic. No technical knowledge on the part of the customer required. The customers would access their database via an Internet URL. At the time, I thought they would want to retain their front-end developers in-house, so the idea was just about databases.
That was somewhere around 2002 - 2003. Amazon started AWS in 2005. In a way, I conceived of the idea of cloud computing before Amazon started offering AWS. I never pursued it, because at the time, I still had both an employee mindset and an engineer mindset. No bragging possible here, I didn't do it. It was just a thought that I had, and talked about.
With that thought, I had anticipated a whole industry, and a mighty one. Think about that. I missed a fortune.
Had I pursued it, even incompetently, I might have been able to build something I could have sold for a lot of money. But at the time, I thought the idea impractical, and I had better things to do (I was married, with children on the way).
At the time, companies with a development IT staff thought in terms of making their own programs, usually out of Visual Basic or some other programming platform. Giant scale web development with Java was an up-and-coming technology, looked upon with suspicion by managers.
Now, all of this has been supplanted with new technologies that allow you to create entire development stacks in your own dev box (I know, I just made one), including the back-end database. You can do more now by yourself in a day than my whole team accomplished in a year. Breath-taking!
The take-away from this story is as old as time, but very relevant: ordinary people come up with extraordinary ideas, often. That they don't pursue them, full-tilt boogie, is a tragedy. My poor brain was not aligned with the tremendous task of bringing one of my ideas to market, fast. I couldn't do it, folks.
I am different now, and I am taking my ideas to market as fast as I can. You are now reading the results.
Don't talk about your good ideas. Write them down. Assess what is stopping you from immediately taking the idea to the market, where you can test it in real conditions and in real time. Continue to develop it until it either pays off or falls into dust. Rinse and repeat.
Your mind will undergo significant change in the process, as will your heart. It's worth it - your ideas, crazy or not, can have significant value. Failures will be part of the minefield you navigate as you do this.
Remember the story of J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. She is now a billionaire. When she started, she was a poor, single mum on public assistance.
I encourage all of you to have respect for the ideas you generate. Maybe they won't turn out, but, importantly, maybe they will!
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