Rizwan's Blog -Developer's hangout!

I just had a chance to visit Microsoft Pakistan head office here at Karachi, Pakistan. We discussed about on going Microsoft campaigns in the region, more areas to improve and collaborating and training our IT workforce too. I am glad I had an offer from the Microsoft Team to become a Professional Partner of Microsoft with my organization. Yuppy I am too happy....below are the pictures we took after the meeting :)

Remember the lessons on investments from old college days? Yes, the one that suggests, not to invest in the same industry or infrastructure, instead portfolio diversification was encouraged, but hey all these lessons were also valid and incorporated in IT infrastructure implementations, where organizations use to build a scattered or a central IT infrastructure to avoid any disaster and to recover using data backed up at other remote locations and for various other practices. Hence increasing the running and maintenance cost for the infrastructure. Then came the cloud computing concept, right after initiatives taken in web development hence promoting Web Applications now it is obvious all the flavours in Cloud Computing (IaaS, Paas, Saas) are here in IT to stay forever! Any guess why I am saying this? What's all in it for us (developers) and other parties involved? (But before I could start explaining why…I must let you guys know, development is no different for cloud, same g...

  Almost everyone who is beginning to read about Cloud Computing will encounter the difficulty of understanding the intricate difference between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS under the Cloud Computing realm. I am detailing the differences below in a way I understood it. May be you have an alternate approach to understanding the difference, nevertheless I believe that the explanation below gives you an insight into the beautiful difference between the three terminologies. Firstly, the terms stand for the following: SaaS: Software as a service. PaaS: Platform as a service. IaaS:  Infrastructure as a service. Whenever you consider a cloud computing system, (or rather let’s consider a simple server), there are three main types of capabilities that it exposes. These are: 1) Computing: Of course, you need lot of computing power to perform complex calculations. This is achieved by installing high-end complex processors into the hardware to expose to computing capability. Such processors ...

… is that most of the time, they won’t work for you or me. They worked for somebody, some time, in some situation, in the past. Sure, the idea of best practices is attractive. Supposedly you or I can follow along, obediently, and succeed using so-called best practices. Too bad it doesn’t work. For example, Jim Collins’ blockbuster business book Good to Great , published in 2001, featured 11 supposedly great companies. All of them did extraordinarily well on the stock market for 10-20 years. But by 2008, when Steven Levitt posted Good to Great to Below Average on Freakonomics, two of them had died. He wrote: Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500. I don’t mean to criticize Jim Collins, his book, o...