Shahzad Bhatti Welcome to my ramblings and rants!

April 22, 2009

Waterfall model of Hardware Acquisition

Filed under: Computing — admin @ 5:22 pm

I have been ordering a bunch of machines for a new project we are launching in a month and despite the fact that I work for biggest provider of cloud computing, we still use old fashioned acquisition process where the purchase of some machines can take months. So, I have been struggling to find the right size for different services we will be deploying. I find such acquision model similar to waterfall projects where you try to come up with requirements in beginning and in a lot of cases you end up with more requirements you need (because you won’t be able change them) or the requirements that are not suitable in the end. On the other hand, I find hardware based on “cloud computing” or “virtualization” like agile methodologies where you start with just enough resources you need and then add more servers as you grow. Also, as retail business is highly seasonal you can grow and shrink as needed. This is why I like services like EC2, S3 or SimpleDB, but due to security and other corporate policies we can’t use them for internal applications, I feel like child of cobbler who can’t get the shoes even though we provide these services to thousands of other companies.

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