How is your old architecture doing?

How is your old architecture doing?

Going through my usual course of daily reading, I logged into my twitter account to see what was going on in the outside world. One of the people that I follow on twitter is Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon. ( http://www.allthingsdistributed.com )

Usually his posts are pretty eclectic. They range from serious business topics to pictures of art work to music he likes. But today, he posted a very interesting question. Apparently Mr. Vogels is sitting on a "Confidence in the Cloud" business / industry panel today and posted a tweet on the following "on "Confidence in the Cloud" panel, but the right question is "do you have confidence in your old architecture as foundation for the future".

So, is your existing architecture ready to move you into the future? People have a lot of concerns about using the cloud right now. With all the hype out there and very little in the way of solid direction, it's not a surprise. With many different questions being asked, most of them focusing on the "security" question. (Although, I have to admit that this is starting to not be the hot topic it once was)

Whether you're comparing to a public cloud, like AWS, or a private cloud like 3Tera's AppLogic, can your existing architecture provide you with the on-demand capabilities that either one of these can? Do you have the flexibility to move applications from one data center to another, globally, with just a few key strokes or mouse clicks? Do you have the ability to utilize the pay-as-you-go model with your existing architecture?

That one simple question can really make you stop and think about how you are going to move forward and the early adopters in the Enterprise are really going to be the ones that benift from the Cloud the most. Particularly when they team up with SI's like Cirrhus9 that understand how to properly move servers and applications into the cloud, in controlled and measured ways.

So, again, I repeat Mr. Vogels question "do you have confidence in your old architecture as foundation for the future"?

Mike