Suppose there is a town with just one public IaaS cloud provider, and that every business in the town runs their own IT: some by hosting it on-premises, some by running it in the cloud. It seems reasonable to imagine that the cloud provider obeys the following rule: it runs IT for all and only those businesses that do not run their IT on-premises.

Under this scenario, we can ask the following question: is cloud provider’s own IT in the cloud or on-premises? (remember that the cloud provider itself is also a business)

Of course this “faux” paradox is not a paradox at all. As I suggested on Twitter, “if you build a cloud, to your customers it will indeed look like a cloud; but to you it will look like a regular datacenter.”

Earlier this month, Seth Godin, one of the leading thinkers of our digital age, wrote a post titled Do ads work?

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?

Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.

So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them

Some of you may recall my love towards parallels between IT and other disciplines. If we twist these words a bit, we get this:

So, why, precisely do you have specific maintenance windows which are the only times when changes in production are allowed – don’t they just unnecessarily delay the changes that inevitably are going to be made?

If the changes you are about to make work, if you can measure them and they improve your product more than they cost, why not keep making these changes until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you making these changes?

I know it’s a stretch but worth thinking about nevertheless… Release often FTW.

Google released their App Engine yesterday. Very cool python goodness, supposedly with access to their BigTable and GFS and supposedly free for use up to a certain limit.

In the meantime, Google engineers (or was it designers?) came up with a new type of aircraft. You probably have heard about flying wings, but it looks to me like the concept of “a flying engine” has been introduced for the first time. And it’s a very simple design too – you take a jet engine, and attach wings and a tail to it. I am not a specialist, but I don’t see a reason why it won’t fly.

Seriously though, Google definitely has my respect for doing things like this.