In general, I’m a cynical, Negative Poo-Poo Head. In the last few years, I’ve become more and more this way when it comes to technology trends. My first reflex as to why, is my increased time spent working with developers on a day-to-day basis, and my perception of how development  is susceptible to Flavor-of-the-Week-itis. I don’t think that’s really the cause; instead, I think I’m just getting more cynical as I get older in general. I know, this isn’t necessarily a good thing, but that’s a different blog post. The good news here is that I at least can still turn it off when I need to.

Anyway, the Cloud and my negative poo-pooness.

I’ve basically spent more time making fun of Cloud Computing than I have learning about it. “Oh, it’s the dumb terminal/mainframe paradigm all over again”, “There’s something wrong with this whole thing when you can buy a shipping container full of servers, put it out back, and call it a ‘private cloud’”, “It’s just the latest buzzword/flavor-of-the-week”, on and on. Honestly, even though Brent, Buck, and others have been saying it’s the Way of the Future™, I didn’t buy it.

Well…I think I’m on board now.

What changed my mind?

I don’t think I can nail it down to one thing, but I can point to a couple things that have been going on lately that played into this change of heart.

Last Friday was the Nashville SQL Users Group Meeting. Presenting was Brian Prince (Twitter | Blog (lookit dat Gamerscore) ) on SQL Azure. I was pretty interested in this topic due to wanting to actually learn something about this stuff that I make fun of. OK, that and I am a little interested to see what all the fuss is about.

Although I had to leave early due to an unfortunately-scheduled meeting, I did get to see most of Brian’s presentation. I was impressed with a lot of what I saw. I was impressed by the shipping containers full of servers that make up open-air datacenters. I was impressed by how they each can have their own genset backup power sitting next to them, how the servers in the containers live at 95^o F, are cooled primarily by what basically amount to Swamp Coolers, and pretty much never get touched once they’re racked up. During this part of the presentation, the Sysadmin in me was clamoring to give up the DBA thing and figure out how to get a job building/supporting this stuff, because it looks just that awesome…

Brian then went into the components the Azure platform and where SQL Azure sits in it and how it is supported, replicated, and made available. We also got to see how you actually use the system along with some good arguments about DBs that we all have in our environments that would be good candidates to move to the cloud. The prices seem pretty good (I haven’t done any extensive calculations) when compared with running small but still mission-critical DBs in-house… It all actually sets up a pretty good argument.

All of this good info and eyes-on examples went a long way to getting me over whatever I was afraid of or didn’t buy about the system.

Buck has been going on about this whole thing for a while, and even put his money where his mouth is and is moving over to the Azure team. At first, I thought that was a loss for the SQL Community, but I think with my improving outlook, I don’t feel that way anymore. I believe it will be for the better, and I can’t wait to hear more from him in the future.

These are a couple of the things that have been going on lately that are beginning to change my mind about the cloud. I’m looking forward to learning more about it and considering it as an implementation option in the future.