4 years ago…

4 years ago this week I was preparing for a 2 week trip to Amsterdam for the EPSIAE Green IT trip. With a focus on sustainability in IT, and alongside my fellow students from Birmingham City University we visited the Dutch HQ of IBM, Microsoft, Philips and Cisco, we even visited a data centre and a regional electric company! From the information we gained over the 2 weeks, and with many laughs along the way, we worked towards the theory of cloud, which featured in many of our final year projects in some way or other. Between the 4 of us, guided by our lecturer we developed the ECCF (European Combined Cloud Framework) – this is better explained in the animation below, however the concept is something I have come back to this week. After delving more into the world of cloud computing, and potentially running enterprise applications at that level (it’s early days) I have come to be baffled by the different terminologies and technologies used across cloud providers, why can’t we all just agree on our a basic set of principles that are named and defined the same? Sure each provider will have its niche (otherwise there’d be no competition), but the standard set of “here’s a server with 2 cores, 4gb ram and 500gb disk” should be stated in the same phrasing! – Rant over, here’s the rather dodgy animation I did 4 years ago…