Astoria... Who Cares!? We All Do!

Yeah, yeah, I know, first my blogging dries up like Mussolini's tears and then all of a sudden, it pours like Bob Hawke's when he discovered T.V! But it's because I'm not fully duplex! I either work on the tools, or I blog! No both!

Anyhoo, so I just got out of a meeting with some of our local influencer heavyweights, and on exiting, Ed Richard from MOSSIG fame asks me, "So what's up with Astoria? Why should I care?"

I fumbled around for while to come up with a decent answer; "Database in the cloud", "Simplified Persistence", the dribble flowed forth. And then, without any use of "The Secret", it came to me!

"Because you don't have to worry about how to scale!"... Yes, seriously, when I think about all the goodness that the cloud gives me, the biggest aspect is the relief from caring about how many boxes, services, volts, watts, bytes, processes, gypsy tears, or donuts I need to provide top shelf scalability.

See, when Microsoft, or any of the big web bosses provide any cloud service (ala Hotmail, Live, etc), they worry about that stuff. So whether I'm just one guy with a dream and a slice of pizza (see Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success), or a mega-site with millions of subscribers, I don't have to worry about where the data is coming from. And because they are leveraging an economy of scale, they can offer it to everyone at the same ridiculously low price, at the top end of SLA, which reduces the barrier to entry. This is what the whole cloud thing is about! Delivering a billion dollar, web platform, on-tap, to anyone and everyone, for next to nix!  

So next time someone asks you, "Why are you putting component x of your app in the cloud?", just hand them a slice of pizza, point them in the direction of their closest cloud platform provider, and send them off with a gentle slap on the butt!

Disclaimer: I, the company I work for, the town I live in, the dog I feed, or the slugs that come out of my shower at night while I sleep, do not in any way, endorse touching anyone, anywhere, anytime (without their prior written consent!).