Aug 15, 2014

I’m going to take you on a short journey, back a couple of years where we’ll find a younger version of myself, bright-eyed, enthusiastic…nah, really not a lot different. I had been pondering “the cloud” as you do, and one day, I had an epiphany. I had had many conversations with students and colleagues about the impact of “the cloud” (okay, I’ll stop doing that now…). In many ways, my opinion was still largely unformed, but I kinda had niggling feelings that I didn’t quite like it…and maybe you could put those down to being a bit of a curmudgeon, but still, there were aspects of the cloud that made me a little uncomfortable. I guess my major issues were with security and sovereignty. At heart I’m a DBA, and as such I simply didn’t like the idea that “my” data was somewhere that I couldn’t physically touch. To be honest, I now think that’s such a ludicrous thought. What does it matter if you can or can’t physically touch the server where your data resides? It doesn’t make it any safer to have that particular server within arm’s reach, does it? No! Silly. Sovereignty is the other issue. Now, really, this is the domain of governments, not my problem. It’s really kind of pointless sitting around worrying about whether or not sales tax will apply to someone purchasing a product from my company, and which countries sales tax would apply, if at all, depending on where my data is physically located. It’s in a data centre…somewhere. It shouldn’t matter if that data centre is here in Australia or not; the point is, the laws as they apply to my company in Australia should apply. Again, though, this is the realm of governments, and largely (though not entirely) not my concern. We could argue that governments are slow to act (or react, mostly) to these issues. Or maybe it wouldn’t be so much of an argument as sitting around laughing and despairing at how inadequate our governments are, or the glacial pace at which they move. At the end of the day, a lot of our current laws simply do not apply in the current information age, but I’m not going to get into that. So, getting back to my epiphany. It occurred to me that companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Adobe (name your favourite vendor here) were not spending billions of dollars and squillions of hours moving themselves and their products to the cloud to suddenly stop and say, “Whoa, hang on, Adam has some misgivings, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.” What an insight! I had come to realise that these companies knew what they were doing. They also understood all the arguments that I could muster and were working on them. These are responsible companies, easily worth over a trillion dollars collectively, and they weren’t about to embark on some ill-conceived plan without having already put substantial thought into it. So, what was I to do? Easy! Get on board. If I didn’t, I’d be left behind. I’m betting you could come up with half a dozen things that have simply disappeared in the last twenty years due to innovation. Here’s my question for you: do you want your continued employment to go the way of those, now defunct, products? Hmmm…I didn’t think so. What are you to do? Again, the answer is startlingly easy. Learn all you can about the cloud and how your particular area of interest is being and will be impacted by cloud technologies. I’d suggest a good place for you to start is to attend New Horizons’ 10977A – Updating Your SQL Server Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 training course. This is a great course for those people looking to bring their skills up to date with SQL Server 2014. It includes four (out of sixteen, or 25%) modules directly related to how you might interact with cloud technologies. It represents a great start to your new life in the clouds.