Being a strategist, enterprise architect, chief architect and a leader, I do not believe in setting direction without knowing or approximating the n th step. In one way, it is very mathematical in the approach as similar to dynamic programming. As dynamic programming used computer programs like computer chess programs, estimating the n th step is based on probable choices using intuition and facts. The facts has the highest probability for success than intuition and I prefer to use the fact when fact can be searched and found. Use intuition only when the facts can not be found.

Cloud computing is in every practical enterprise architect’s or IT strategist’s technology road map and the implementation of the cloud computing for any IT organization is the question of when. Cloud computing has enough cloud in the sky and in some area it is already drizzling and in some area it is more than drizzling. It is going to rain and as people say, when it rains, it pours. Same thing is applicable to cloud computing. It is going to rain all over and when it rains, it is going to pour.

To be proactive for any future requirement for the organization (like I did with google apps on gmail), as an enterprise architect leader, I subscribed to the amazon cloud to set up an infrastructure for web hosting.

I would like to summarize my findings in an executive level.

1. Set up an elastic amazon cloud for a web site is very easy and designed for a non technical person. (Obviously, it is very very easy to set up for a technical person)
2. Select the stack you would like to have in the cloud. There are numerous infrastructure stack already available and ready to use (like wordpress, LAMP, Identity management and etc). It is also easy to create a custom stack for your use or promote it your stack for a public use.
3. Create an elastic IP address for the stack created.
4. Login to the clone (or instance) using ssh and do the necessary configuration
5. Load the application
6. Map the domain address to the elastic IP address
7. If the traffic to the site increases, increases the number of clones (or instances) associated to the dynamic IP address
8. It cost me $2.18 and my 30 minutes time (cost for my 30 minute is priceless!)

All the above steps were done in less than 30 minutes with out any prior training. The site was launched in 30 minutes. The above steps make me think, why an organization has to have an army of people to set up and support an infrastructure? CXO, if you are reading this blog, do not spend any more of your significant G&A budget on the infrastructure, ask your enterprise architect to look into cloud computing and save significant cost and divert your G&A into innovation, investment management and enterprise architecture!