news.buyenne.com

Enlarge / Fly, legacy app code! Off to the cloud!

Over the past decade, companies have virtualized more and more of their IT. We’ve moved to cloud services and “DevOps” to build and deploy bundles of our new applications. But a significant portion of most organizations' applications still run inside the corporate firewall today. Such setups use tried and true technologies, like 32-bit Windows code and enterprise Java, that were developed without any consideration for the cloud.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: the best way to have a butt-kicking cloud-native application is to write one from scratch. Leverage the languages, APIs, and architecture of the chosen cloud platform before exploiting its databases, analytics engines, and storage. This will allow you to take advantage of the wealth of resources offered by companies like Microsoft, with their Azure PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering or by Google Cloud Platform’s Google App Engine PaaS service.

Sometimes, however, that’s not the job. Sometimes, you have to take a native application running on a server in your local data center or colocation facility and make it run in the cloud. That means virtual machines.

Enlarge (credit: airplaneengine)

The 8-track cartridge, aka the Stereo 8, first appeared at trade shows in 1964, just 18 months after the cassette, and it did initially seem to have it all: it was comparatively small, portable, and had pretty good audio quality. And despite its roots in the Mad Men in-car market of the 1950s, it was seemingly future-proof, too, with a unique potential for quadraphonic sound (a potential later realised, in part). Within a few years various megastars were using it and it was swiftly installed in virtually every radio station in the western world—and, with rising domestic sales, it even had a massive ad campaign fronted by TV star Jimmie "Dy-no-mite!" Walker.

Yet within a few years of that expensive media blitz, the cartridge was dead in the water as far as the consumer market was concerned—and, by the mid-1990s, it was a rare antique even in broadcasting studios. What went wrong is easily explained with hindsight—though it seemed mysterious at the time.

To begin at the beginning, the 8-track was based on something refined by the one-and-only Earl "Madman" Muntz. Master Muntz was a businessman, engineer, and promoter who became famous—or, rather, infamous—in the US for his outrageous clothes, stunts, and TV appearances. He was quoted—and mocked—by many top celebs and comedians such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny. And Muntz loved publicity so much that during the height of McCarthyism—with people being sacked or deported merely for having communist friends—he seriously asked one of his advisers "do you think I’ll make the front pages again if I now join the Communist Party?"