I’ve been talking about my cloudy future for a while and it looks like this fourth quarter I will be crossing the chasm and spending more and more of my compute work up in those clouds. I’ve had an Amazon AWS account for a couple years but finally the time I’m spending working in those is clouds is closing on the amount of time I spend working in traditional environments.
To solidify all that I will be adding another ninja tool to my belt which is Opscode Chef. In a couple weeks I’ll be heading to Opscode’s bootcamp in NYC. Chef is basically a framework and toolset for configuring entire environments, something you almost never think about as a consultant who has to sit around and wait for infrastructure specialists or customer IT staffers, but once you get liberated of all that you think about a bit more.
If you’re an Oracle or any sort of EPM consultant you know that the result of the thin client multitier inter-operative strategic directions taken a decade ago has introduced you to that dreaded word ‘stack’. No longer do you just deal with a product, but with a stack of services that support and interoperate with a suite of this that and the other. The days of simple client-server are over, or they are for the time being until you can use tools like Chef to configure your stack on the fly.
So what we’ve already done at Full360 is make it brain dead simple to throw up an instance of Oracle 11.1.2 EPM or Vertica + Jaspersoft on AWS. That means, and believe me because just did it this month, I can do a POC in a week, just like in the old days. I can’t describe how liberating it is to be free of concerns about environment configuration and just focus on the application. But even more cool is how powerful I can be once I start taking for granted that I can use big and multiple virtual hardware any way I want. And this is where Chef comes in.
What I’m going to do is come up with optimum configurations for all of the different sorts of BI, DW and EPM stacks I’m going to use. This means Palo. This means Essbase. This means Vertica. (OK I’m database centric, I admit it) This means a rightsized environment I can tweak over time and replicate with Chef recipes whenever I need it. My Ruby is a little crusty but I’m not particularly worried about it.
Not to pat myself too hard on my back but a dozen years ago I was the first bloke to publish a capacity planning guide for Essbase. If I can remember how to think as sharply as I used to, this is going to be very cool as we at Full360 work with Amazon, Opscode and our elasticBI & elasticEPM customers to craft and maintain the ultimate environments.
Can’t wait.
