Have you ever felt that there was something like a “disturbance in The Force” in regard to our education system? I do. But, as someone that it is far from being an expert on the subject, I don’t feel confident enough to even consider that my arguments are based on a set of solid criteria.
Anyway, I have always have a feeling that something was wrong. And, once again, I find myself in front of an awesome talk -“Leading@Google”, by Josh Kaufman- learning about the difference between Education and Accreditation. I invite you to take some time to watch it, it worth every minute invested:
Obviously, this is only one part of the picture: at least, the one I am able to see. The following collection of videos address this question from different perspectives and, basically, they all reach to the same conclusion: our education system is broken and needs to be reinvented.
Cloud Computing has been a buzz topic for a while. I understand it: it promises exciting benefits and, therefore, everyone wants to be there. Obviously, that’s not new. Nevertheless, I happened to attend several Cloud Computing events recently and I couldn’t help having a strange feeling of “déjà vu”:
both Skeptics and Believers keep saying the same things over and over again.
there seems to be some confusion or lack of understanding about how different concepts and components relate to each other.
a broad set of diverse offerings and their respective confusing marketing messages don’t help to understand the context.
That is why I’ve decided to sort out my ideas and tell you my own vision about this subject. But, before going on, I would like to point out some important nuances:
I am a Believer with huge respect on Skeptics points of view.
This is a complex phenomenon with many interrelated and relevant perspectives that have to be analyzed both individually and also as a whole.
I believe that this is a never ending learning process. In fact, I have invested a quite significant amount of time listening, reading, thinking and discussing about this matter. So, this vision is inevitably connected to what I’ve learned and, of course, is the reason why I have waited so long to write this down.
Today I would like to recall a really nice conference I saw last January: “Infrastructure in the Cloud Era”. This presentation was performed at O’Reilly Velocity Conference 2009 by Adam Jacob (Co-Founder at OpsCode) and Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Co-Founder at EngineYard).
They cover the theory of how you should be thinking about building a Fully Automated Infrastructure classifying their analysis in the following areas:
Configuration: Manual, Ad-Hoc,Infrastructure as Code.
Command and Control: Manual, Ad-Hoc, Framework.
They conclude, in the context of a Cloud Infrastructures, that the appropriate way to answer the issues an challenges on each of these categories is: Cloud (IaaS), Infrastructure as Code and a Framework for Command and Control.
There exist a clear positioning around Open Source on the hole talk. In fact, they mainly propose Open Source Tools for an Open Source Environment:
