Cloud computing has gotten a bad rap for the past several years. Mostly due to people who create ambiguity and confusion because of either ignorance and/or salesmanship. The truth is that it’s not that difficult to define it as a service you subscribe to. As a baseline, check out the Wikipedia entry for “Cloud Computing“. The list of types of cloud computing mirror all that I’ve seen in industry publications (though “data as a service” is new to me) and they are all services. I guess that means that AOL could come back with ‘internet as a service’ and create a blackhole of logic that would devour the web. I’m convinced that people want technology to be more magical than it really is, and look at this sort of thing with awe and wonder, much like you might stare at clouds and think “all that water…”.
Anyway, we have been using cloud services to some degree, and I hope that we can continue to expand our use. We decided to use Twilio for sending SMS messages for password resets in our upcoming Account Management System. It’s cheap, but most importantly, it’s extremely simple to work into our applications. The amount of time we saved by just sending them some cash is well worth it.
There are other systems like that which I hope begin to be seriously looked at instead of immediately dismissed due to their simple and easy nature. One such service is Stripe which is for taking credit card payments. The way it’s marketed though is towards the backend developers. I don’t see many people looking at this seriously as a quick and easy alternative for taking payments.
