This week I’ve been attending a cloud architecture workshop. Not to architect a cloud for anyone in particular but to learn what the approach to architecting clouds should be. This being an IBM workshop there was, of course, lots of Tivoli this, WebSphere that and Power the other. Whilst the workshop was full of good advice I couldn’t help of thinking of this cartoon from 2008:
 |
| Courtesy geekandpoke.typepad.com |
Just replace the word ‘SOA’ with ‘cloud’ (as ‘SOA’ could have been replaced by ‘client-server’ in the early nineties) and you get the idea. As software architects it is very easy to get seduced by technology, especially when it is new and your vendors, consultants and analysts are telling you this really is the future. However if you cannot explain to your client why you’re building him a cloud and what business benefit it will bring him then you are likely to fail just as much with this technology as people have with previous technology choices.
Software Architecture Zen 
Pete,
Always a pleasure in reading your blogs.
I have noticed that business benefits are not properly quantified for future to monitor impact analysis and help re-strategize. Most benefit calculation is made on the data for last year and upto 2 years. The engineering and adoption costs are never computed and analyzed year-over-year to monitor the investment. In most cases, we are still heavily investing into engineering and adoption even when an alternative is emerging, just because our benefits are based on historical records and not computed real time.
Subhav
I completely agree.
Very often there is a big gap between Business and IT.
We use the buzz words and know that this technology is trendy.
But we miss the common sense and rationale to justify our solutions.