Displaying articles for: 07-22-2012 - 07-28-2012
Software Engineer a protected title in Texas – is this the start of something new?
The new NCEES Software Engineering PE exam is ready and will be offered for the first time in April 2013. Everyone practicing software engineering in Texas is encouraged to register for the exam.
There has always been some concern about the cavalier way the term engineer is used – especially in the area of software. In many parts of the world, the boarders for these terms are more clear cut than in others. Having clear definitions should have a wide impact, especially in this world of XaaS and high job turnover.
You can join the OpenStack Foundation…
OpenStack has gained a lot of momentum in recent months, and many are interested in following the progress of the project and/or contributing to it in a variety of ways. With the creation of the new OpenStack Foundation, you can express your needs… They state their mission as:
“The OpenStack Foundation is an independent body providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission by Protecting, Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the community around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem.”
They even have an OpenStack blog to keep up with what is going on.
Standards and the cloud lifecycle
Organizations like the Open Group and Open Cloud Consortium are defining standardize for some areas of cloud computing (mostly on the lowest layers of cloud). OpenStack and CloudStack, are currently examples of de facto standards. Although OpenStack has over 150 supporters, including HP, it is not a shoe in as “the” cloud-computing standard, but it does seem to dominate.
For cloud providers, the presence of multiple standards means they will need to select which standards to support or implement more than one standard. This adds to costs, so hopefully a standards consolidation effort is in the industry’s future.
From a customer perspective, using standards as part of a selection process is important, since the business could run the risk of tying their computing to a solution that cannot be supported elsewhere or relying on automation and monitoring tools that cannot be replaced effectively.
Even if a cloud provider meets all an organization’s needs today, migration to another vendor will likely happen at some point in the future. This can easily be more expensive and time consuming than an initial roll out. As I have said to numerous people in the paste the megabytes of data on the cloud today can quickly turn into petabytes in the future. This can be a pivot point for the private vs. public cloud decision for a larger enterprise.
The movement to cloud for most organizations for some percentage of their work is inevitable. The long-term lifecycle perspective is not always thought about when reaching an agreement today, but it needs to be. Standards play a role.
