Misc. Tidbits from Interop 2011

This week, at Interop, I attended Private and Public Cloud Days in which speakers discussed the relative merits, drawbacks, and case studies. I've compiled a few ideas that I thought were interesting:

• Regarding private clouds, we have commonly referred to them in the context of dev/test, but in reality, their value is much more important as a way to deliver "IT as a service".
• Since clouds are commonly built on hardware that is not designed with redundancy in mind, cloud computing does not automatically imply redundancy. High availability is included in the architecture of your instance footprint (e.g., no IP hardcoding, no DB source hardcoding, etc.) and application(s) running on it.
• Redundancy costs money. Because of this, your organization needs to understand its tolerance to risk (and recovery point and time objectives (RPO/RTO)) and then design to meet this tolerance level.
• "Big data" should be actionable. Instead of thinking in terms of data, think in terms of business problems and solving those.
• Fear of lock-in from platforms (PaaS) is irrational since programmers have been locking themselves in by the simple act of choosing a programming language.