Moving into the cloud is a big paradigm shift. Its hard to imagine what such a big change might look like, so start small. Don’t try to offload your whole system at once. Offload the small stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

One interesting use case for using the cloud is backup integrity checks for databases. Here is the scenario. You are doing backups regularly of your databases. You need to restore them every once and a while and verify they aren’t corrupt. There are a few options:

• Run this on your production server – Asking for trouble
• Run this on a dedicated server for integrity checks – $$$ Expensive
• Run this on a shared machine – Sharing is for adolescents, your developers should share as little as possible

But there is one more option, infrastructure in the cloud. One of my teams recently started using cloud servers to perform the actual verification checks. So you continue to do the backups as normal. But now, your integrity checks spin up a new server in a few minutes, upload the data and verification code, and run the tests. Once your done, you spin down the server and your done. (Cloud servers doesn’t have an API yet, so we just leave a cheap instance running currently, but once the API is released it will be fully automated)

This is very useful for a few reasons. You don’t mess with your production environment. You only need a small amount of computing power to accomplish this, so you only pay for a small amount of computing power. You don’t share servers, so one team can’t hurt other teams.

Once you understand the new paradigm, super simple solutions to problems start appearing everywhere. Don’t try to rewrite everything at once, just start making small iterative changes that make sense.

Today I gave a talk about Cloud Computing, and was posed with an interesting question.

How can we sell cloud computing to the non-technical decision makers?

I wasn’t really prepared for the question, because I was trying to sell it to technical people. But it is a very valid question, because the IT department of many businesses must go through others to get decisions approved.

The first thing that came to mind wasn’t cost, or ease of use, it was who else is using it? When looking at outsourcing to another company, one of the most important things to do is understand how others view the company. For the same reason Amazon has user reviews of products, you need to look at reviews of cloud service providers. Who uses them and likes them? Who dislikes them and why?

Most cloud companies have a list of customers using their services. Understanding how others are using the cloud is really the easiest way to understand how you can use the cloud. Forget all the technical details, they don’t matter to non-technical people.

Some great examples are Mailtrust, AWS, Mosso, 3tera, Salesforce, Rackspace, and the list goes on…

Everyone nodded their head at my answer. Hopefully it was a good one.

Any other ideas on how to sell cloud computing to non-technical people?