Journey to the cloud

I have been reading a very interesting free ebook Enterprise Cloud Strategy by Barry Briggs and Eduardo Kassner. 

There are various types of modernisation discussed. 

It is based on Based on “Gartner Identifies Five Ways to Migrate Applications to the Cloud”, Gartner Inc., 2011. 

The overview of cloud migration principles discussed are summarised:

There is new a model that truly adopts cloud taking into account SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. This new architecture principle means considering the best placement of workloads, always looking at SaaS first.

This new way of thinking follows this placement decision tree which helps you make the correct decision on whether to use SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or private cloud.

On the data side, the paper talks about dividing your data into several categories related to risk. This is really about creating your own business data DNA. 'Data analytics' and 'BI and analytics'  cloud architectural blueprints are shared.

An interesting change for roles is the evolution of roles for the cloud. Microsoft suggest the data roles of Data Scientist and Information Architect emerge from the DBA and Statistician.

Database 2011 Predictions

Just read an excellent article five-predictions-for-your-database-in-2011 predicting various trends in Databases in 2011. They predict a decline in NoSQL databases and move towards Database as a Service (DBaaS). DBaaS is about an entire change in philosophy producing efficiency, fluidity of resources, scale out, paying for actual usage and being able to be elastic. Elasticity discussed here
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2010/12/01/the-database-tier-is-not-elastic.aspx.

DaaS (Data as a Service) is about data collections in the sky.
DBaaS (Database as a Service) is about providing full database functionality.