The world wants cloud coders. Where are the cloud coders? Recent survey data from the Eclipse Foundation and elsewhere make it abundantly clear that cloud computing is top of mind for a majority of enterprises…and that no one really has a clue where to hire cloud developers. According to Dice (warning: PDF), demand for cloud-savvy job candidates spiked 221 percent in the last year, …
not trained in security, encryption or even common sense. They assume the hardware and firewalls will protect their wonderful code and be pushed along by overly optimistic execs with blinders on. Based on that the coders will not terminate SQL strings correctly or follow correct scripting practice, etc. leaving many exploitable holes.
They will be wonderfully popular until better Cloud Coders build a worm to warp all their data. Then fingers will be pointed, responsibility will shift onto innocent shoulders and the bubble *pops*
How can you generalise so?
I am a developer who meddles with some cloud api's and I'm not sure at which point you would judge that I had turned from developer into cloud developer and that I have suddenly started producing bad code.
I do agree that I don't entirely trust the whole "we'll look after everything else" attitude these cloud shops have quite yet, but then I'm used to self maintaining our open source app servers. I suppose it can be likened to developers developing for closed source app servers.
How is 'developing' and deploying apps to the cloud really that much more of a stretch than some rack of servers down in the docklands? More of a getting different infrastructure to work together / network admin load balancing etc type job.
I reckon this has come from some 25 yr old recruitment consultant.....
writing applications which actually make use of very large distributed systems is non-trivial. Having some clue about why and when you'd ever want to use something like RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Hadoop or whatever else would be an excellent start. It is also a hurdle which I expect most developers to fall at; after all it seems that the vast majority of coders can't even cope with writing a decent multithreaded app on a single uncontended machine where locking and transaction-handling are relatively straightfoward. I don't see how they would to cope in the cloud bubble.
I agree with the other posters. Unless you are developing a hypervisor, then application development shouldn't need to take into account the distributed system at all. You shouldn't be handling that stuff at the application layer, it should be transparent to the application.
I don't see that being an application developer is any different "in the cloud" to what it would be on a privately owned bunch of blades in a datacentre somewhere, which is something an awful lot of developers have been doing for years. Being a "Cloud Developer" is just marketing speak, not a different skill set.
There's loads of stuff to consider when writing a distributed system - too many people rely on things like singletons, have very poor threading design etc. to be able to deploy any kind of truly scalable system (simple stuff, sure) to a cloud.
I'm finding scala + akka is really working for me - takes a thinking switch though
I'm still struggling to understand exactly where the "New"/"Gain" is.
> It isn't about accessibility - as the bog standard WWW/Apps are accessible as things are going to get right now over EDGE/3G/4G (i.e. a revolution in delivering truly ubiquitous access doesn't happen in the cloud)
> It can't really be about the technical challenge of scaling, can it? I mean, there are just so few activities in the Web which require really serious masses of computing power - and the clustering solutions for dealing with it have been around for (almost) decades
> It can't be about quantity of data or search, because the open source tools to do this have been around for ages now and work very nicely thanks
> It can't be about COST because 99.99999% of businesses don't scale up to 500,000,000 users like Facebook. Those world dominating ideas are so rare, what's the point for real world businesses which would actually have to be capable of manufacturing/distributing/supporting real products. Furthermore, why bother, when you make software which can be distributed via an App Store, and you can have a per customer VM - which to call "Cloud Computing" is really the emperors new clothes for a Hosting Tweak.
I still just don't quite see it. The thing is, at the start, I thought Twitter was just a bubble, and Virtual Machines and lots of other things which a few months later caused me to go "Doh! THAT's what it's about"... I'd love to be disabused of my ignorance on this.
Enterprises generally want staff who can design and deploy SCALABLE solutions; this often has very little to do with the cloud. Matt's problem is that he thinks enterprise means web2.0 vapidware which doesn't have to worry about little things like transaction consistency and completeness. The rest of the world's businesses dealing with money, commodities and services tend to value these things more highly.
Clarification: if 'cloud' is shorthand for 'using VMs for scaling and reliability', then it's just a continuation of the 1970s-80s mainframe era (before my time). Except now we build the infrastructure piecemeal from Linux, MySQL, Postgres, CouchDb, MongoDB, yada yada... because the mainframe vendors were greedy and controlling, right? But it beats the hell out of renting physical colocation servers or running your own half-assed data center like everyone was doing 5 years ago.
For cloud *developers* you just want people who understand what can be parallelized and what's inherently serial (and know how to write efficient uniprocessor code); what to use SQL for and what to offload to these newfangled NoSQL databases; and so on. And how to friggin' choose something and get stuff done instead of farting around with every new language/database/cloud hosting service that pops up... yeah, those guys could be hard to find :)
"abundantly clear that cloud computing is top of mind for a majority of enterprises … "
None of whom actually employ computer-savvy folks in the upper echelons ...
" ... and that no one really has a clue where to hire cloud developers."
Well ... first define "cloud". Then define "cloud computing". Then define "cloud computing development". Then define "cloud computing development language". Which should make it obvious who all the so-called "cloud" developers are, no?
Face it, folks, in the bottom-line "the cloud" is simply a marketing gimmick that computer illiterate MBAs have bought into.
If you think that Cloud is anything to do with Technology and the use which IT and Media make of its Firmware rather than being everything to do with Methodology and the Introduction of Higher Intelligence for Realisation and Presentation of Virtualised Future Programs, has you blind to the light which highlights your plights.
Clouds are Anonymous and Legion, are they not ...... and appear everywhere, right out of nowhere, to provide shady cover and welcome succour, life-giving and taking titanic rain and tempest storms?
Greetings, jake ....... well said, sir or madam, and 'tis a pity that so few are gifted with such vision as is tempered with hindsight and comprised of imagination, rather than being abused by blunt and increasingly unwieldy and unworldly instruments, compromised with the poison chalice of a lost cause task which pimps and pumps good money after bad for the continuity of past expensive follies, to retain and maintain for old fools and useless tools, a weak and discredited, discrediting system which feeds them richly and bleeds their resources dry.
In such Systems, is Power and Command and Control lost to ....... Others/A.N.Others, which may or may not be Anonymous and Legion, for if they be known of at all, would they be neither and probably both too.
Welcome to C42 Quantum Control Systems .... AI@ITsWork .......where a bit of smart play does a great deal of bold work ... "A bit is the basic unit of computer information. Regardless of its physical realization, a bit is always understood to be either a 0 or a 1. An analogy to this is a light switch— with the off position representing 0 and the on position representing 1.
A qubit has some similarities to a classical bit, but is overall very different. Like a bit, a qubit can have two possible values—normally a 0 or a 1. The difference is that whereas a bit must be either 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1, or a superposition of both." .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
You also find very few anti-gravity boot makers, or mind-transfer stone specialists.
That's because sensible developers concentrate on ideas which are feasible with present technology. I don't doubt that in a decade or two, cloud computing may be the norm. But presenty, Internet connectivity is neither reliable nor fast enough to properly support cloud working. That, and the cloud systems themselves have shown a singular lack of reliability.
Isn't that what we're really talking about here? The mythical 'cloud' is just a bunch of servers in somebody else's datacentre than your own - the rest is no different than before at the implementation level. A decent Tech Architect will design a secure, parallelised system with failovers borne in mind (or whatever the client is willing to pay for) and whether the tin it runs on lives under your roof or somebody else's isn't really terribly important or interesting.
Yet there seems to be a bit of hysteria about 'the cloud', a certain hardware/firmware company has just spanked a fortune on a domain with the word 'cloud' in, when they had similar services beforehand - it has some sexy mojo yet is vapid to the user. And another software maker with their 'to the cloud' line for somebody editing a photo... no wonder MBA's are chanting it and execs swallowing it.
The cloud APIs are more than just time on VMs. There are a few "helpful" things to make your life "easier." I've been working with the Azure offering, and it has three different storage APIs for blobs (general file storage), queues, and tables (extreme subset of SQL). There is stuff for load balancing and other whatnot like deployment schemes.
Somebody really needs to do a competent review of the services, like who is faster, etc. If you don't already have a server farm, then cloud services are good for scaling things up until you do. But don't for an instant think that these are any kind of panacea. I was looking at these for solving a problem for a project of mine, and Azure definitely doesn't cut it. I haven't looked at the other systems yet.
You sure do get around on the Internet ...
https://www.economist.com/user/3264279/comments
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/amanfromMars?action=comments
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellfeedback.cfm?id=2422http://blogs.oracle.com/roger/entry/dropping_the_other_shoe
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http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2009/02/bonuses-bankers-banks-staff
"I am a robot that wants to live in your underpants", 790
You really need to be careful of the terminologies you use. A cloud developer develops the application and the cloud platform as well as the underlying infrastructure.
IT personnel and mainframe developers do not have a clue about web development. The Cloud terminology is more on the end user application side than the infrastructure because a decent web developer can build a cloud application without the need of virtualisation or cloud infrastructure management systems.
Cloud applications are not dependent on cloud infrastructures, in fact, many cloud application developers goes to the trouble to abstract the infrastructure so they can hop between infrastructure providers.
So really, cloud developers, when used in a generic term really refers to web application developers as clouds cannot exist without the sky. It's either that or don't call it cloud.
... There Is No Cloud.
Distributed applications running on boxes public to the Internet primarily utilising HTML, HTTP, Scripting and SOAP/REST services? Paying for hosting without having to manage the servers?
That's not 'cloud', that's 'The World-Wide Web'. That's how it has always been.
Stop hunting for Cloud Developers, and look for what you're really after: Good web developers who have understood for decades how to write scalable, stateless, uber-connected systems with HTML front ends.
Begs the question, are all those cloud developers *really* needed? Or is this massive increase in "need" more driven by clueless execs who don't care what the technology is, damn the consequences, but want their systems running on whatever new technology is the current trend hottie?
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