Test the Cloud Before Living In It to Avoid Tech Torture
by Pam O'NealWe don’t often include CNN.com in our blogroll here on the BreakingPoint Labs blog, but this week the news site is offering up an intriguing video blog of Topher Kohan’s experience of living (working) in the cloud. Topher has set a challenge for himself to conduct his daily tasks using only cloud-based apps while filming a diary of his experiences. According to Topher:
“I will try to do 100 percent of my job online and not use any desktop applications. So when I check my e-mail, schedule a meeting or write a document, I will do all of this online and then save it in online storage. If it works, I will be able to sit at any computer in the world, and as long as it has Internet access and a browser, I can log in to some Web sites and work.”
Cloud cynics will be disappointed to learn that the videos are not exactly living up to his headline: “Tech Torture with Topher". Wish I could say the same for my own cloud application performance experiences. But things are just starting to heat up as already Topher has run into issues with Twitter. What? The Twitter Fail Whale already? To be fair, an outage or capacity overload was not really the nature of Topher’s chief complaint. It was the lack of functionality for dealing with the overwhelming volume of tweets from the 400 plus Twitterers he follows.
Tune in to watch Topher as he moves on to more complex applications like Google Docs. Heads up Google, Amazon, Twitter and other cloud vendors – this is no time for a major outage or performance issue. Hope you’ve done your due diligence in the area of cloud testing. There’s a large audience of cloud enthusiasts as well as skeptics watching (and commenting) to see Topher be tortured by 12 hour application outages prior to a story deadline, performance issues that would try the patience of Mother Teresa, or perhaps a major security breach involving the loss of Topher’s personal credit card information. Alas, I find myself a bit too excited by the prospects. Don’t let me down guys.
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