It's not a Cloud Datacenter

I hear people refer to their infrastructure in AWS as being part of their ‘cloud datacenter’ on a regular basis. Each and every time, I cringe.

Here’s why.

When we use a term like ‘cloud datacenter’ it reinforces the idea of a physical space where we rack and stack long-living computing, storage, and network gear that we own.

Rather than just replicating our current infrastructure, in the cloud, we should be figuring how to refactor our applications to take advantage a highly flexible platform. Our goal should be to build loosely coupled scalable architectures to support our applications.

Instead of creating long-lived instances which over time drift further and further away from their original configuration and require on-going patching, we should build applications on short-lived instances that are replaced rather than maintained.

Envision the AWS platform as a globally-distributed collection of resources made available to you via an extensive API.