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Time-share computing is back!

I kid you not. Let’s quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing

“Time-sharing is sharing a computing resource among many users by multitasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major historical shift in the history of computing. By allowing a large number of users to interact simultaneously on a single computer, time-sharing dramatically lowered the cost of providing computing, while at the same time making the computing experience much more interactive.”

Virtualisation and Cloud computing are merely the new form of this, and not actually a new concept as such 😉

Both virtualisation and cloud architecture (and combinations thereof) have their place; they’re not the new solution to everything, as any architecture is situation dependent. Looking at the various cloud providers now, they have quite distinct deployment and pricing models which means that different providers will be suitable and economical for different applications. That’s quite interesting. It may well mean that a smart company might deploy independent aspects of their operation on different environments.

Architecting infrastructure is about way more than a properly specced box and a bit of tuning, and that’s why the above is also of interest to Open Query. There are serious technical aspects to this, but also financial and business factors. Haha, and you thought we just did some database stuff 😉

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