Yesterday I was asked to co-host the taking notes podcast ep176 with Bruce Elgort where we talked with Mat Ellis of cloudability.com.

I have to admit that I was not “up” on cloud services very much before Bruce asked me to stand in for Julian and co-host the show. In the past 3 days my eyes have been opened up to the possibility of Amazon AWS and other cloud services. For instance did you know that Amazon hosts free virtual machines for you to use?

Let’s say for example you have multiple customers running different versions of the notes client and/or Internet Explorer and you need different test environments – Rather than keep a development instance of designer and run it locally on your machine you can run it “in the cloud” and remote into the machine and use it there.

So what I hear you say? Well for a start it is always available, from anywhere, from any machine – (internet connectivity permitting) and that provides you some serious advantages:

1. Connectivity from any machine anywhere
2. no need to backup the VM on your computer
3. no need to keep the disk space yourself on your laptop and/or SAN/WAN
4. You only need it when you need it – turn it off when you are not using it
5. Shared access for customers and other developers that you do not have on a local virtual machine.

And this is just from a personal perspective – just imagine what an IT department could use this for?

“Ever need a load of servers quickly? And you thought you had to buy them? now you can test a clustered xpages app in the cloud with 50 servers if you wanted to – use them for an hour – and then puff“

When you start to scale it up and down for IT departments to use there are obviously costs involved, and that is where cloudability helps to come in and track the usage numbers for you – making sure you are not overspending on your cloud investment.

If your interest if piqued listen to the podcast and see what you can learn about cloud cost management and the possibilities.

It is always worth broadening your mind to know what is possible. Even if it is not relevant to your daily work today, it could be tomorrow