Flexibility, Portability, and Resiliency in Today’s IT world

Yesterday, I watched with great interest the Apple announcements coming out of Cupertino regarding the latest products such as the iPhone 6.  And, as an almost ‘afterthought’, they brought out the iWatch, a wearable device that goes with you anywhere.

This reinforces the notion that the “Internet of Everything” offers anything, anywhere, anytime, to anyone, and presents some challenges to the IT community – how can we provide content and services to anyone, anywhere, anytime, while at the same time ensure that this data is updated, patched, backed up, secured, and protected from disasters, data loss and corruption?  It’s sort-of like trying to pave and re-pave an interstate highway while people are driving on it all-day and all-night.

Here at Tendenci, one of the hindrances to providing site availability 24×7 was literally the hardware these sites were running on.  The servers, hard-drives, power supplies, cables, switches, routers, power-distribution networks, even having them all in the same building meant that, if the building lost power, the sites would be down.

So, we began looking for the most effective ways to solve this problem.  Rather than re-invent an entire infrastructure to protect us from failure, why not utilize services from someone who has already solved the problem?  Hello Amazon Web Services.

Recently, Gartner published a report on Cloud-based services and rated Amazon’s portfolio as “Highly Innovative, agile, and responsive to customer needs”.

(the full report is here)

By farming out the hardware to Amazon’s distributed architecture, it has allowed us to focus on more important pieces of the equation – new features and innovation, new technologies and subsystems that streamline performance and capacity, and customer enhancement requests we have received from the community.

As the next version of our product design looms on the horizon, it brings with it all of the heart and soul that open-source community provides.  Watch for some very cool innovative ideas in this space soon!

Scott Pederson