thecapacity

If you’ve read my earlier posts you know I spend a bit of time following Amazon, both from a business perspective as well as my interest in the energy they’ve invested in webservice (SaaS) technologies.

I recently gave a presentation to discuss their offerings and wanted to make that available to anyone interested.

I build presentations that can also act as “guidebooks” once the discussion is over, i.e. the presentation interests someone in the topic, but the charts should also be useful as a starting point for their own experience. Thus I’ve included links and citations for the various sections. It may seem a little overwhelming when you’re just paging through but it seems to work well for my presentation style and my typical audience.

I always find it interesting to compare and contrast my experience with a presentation given verbally vs. paging through the deck later. In an engaging conversation, some of the more interesting and thought provoking dialogs revolve around a single bullet point. However, when paging through a deck you’re often drawn to “examples” which are really for a reference or to substantiate a divergent discussion.

I’m most interested in the “implications and extrapolation” phase of a presentation as opposed to ones that review the “what and why” of an activity.

I hope you’ll find this interesting and helpful and if there’s any parts I can help elaborate on please let me know.

I used to to have many great discussions with a coworker, Dan. I think (hope) we both learned a lot from each other, because even though we have similar “technical philosophies” we approached problems differently, akin to the “Generalist vs Specialist” debates.

Though Dan and I don’t get to have face to face discussions anymore, we still frequently trade links and thanks to technology it doesn’t seem too hard to continue the development of our insights.

He recently sent me an article about architecting defensive SaaS deployments , which is something we’ve talked a lot about in the past. The article proposes a good analogy but I think makes a mistake in equating SaaS architectures as the “extreme” end of that analogy, i.e. large cruise ships.

In my experience, large heavily-defensive deployments are more analogous to a mainframe environments. Sinclair seems to overlook this larger extreme and only contrast SaaS with a localized service model.

In my experience although SaaS lies somewhere in between a truly distributed model and a truly centralized model it’s not really fulfilling this role in the same ways, i.e. it’s not a differently sized ship.

SaaS architectures are more like getting around Europe. You’ve got planes, trains, automobiles and yes, even boats. Each transport has it’s own qualities of service, it’s own pros and cons.

It’s not a defensive posture that makes SaaS successful but rather the flexibility in choice.