Man, you know, I keep looking at all this cloud advertising MS is putting out there, and all the propaganda they’re spinning around Azure and there’s one thing that’s screaming loud and clear.  Those who don’t jump on the cloud wagon are going to get left behind.  I get this message mainly from those DBAs and evangelists who have bought into the whole bag because when people buy into something so wholly.

But frankly I’m tired of being made to feel like I’m going to be a dinosaur or get left completely behind if I don’t buy into Azure.  I’m an enterprise DBA, and Azure is very new and as far as I’m concerned it’s just a way for MS to make sure they get paid for all their license fees.  It’s much harder to pirate software when you host it yourself.  But here’s something… and you’re going to find this shocking… just because MS had an idea and decided to market it doesn’t mean that the rest of us are going to fall behind if we continue doing what we’re doing.  It’s not like I’m refusing to learn any of the new features or to expand my understanding of current ones.  I study SQL quite a bit throughout the week and I work really hard to stay current.  And I think I can survive for quite some time without moving my company to the cloud.  Not only will be be a long time before it can do as much as I can with my own install, but there are still tons of privacy and regulatory issues to work out. 

All of this is to try to make it sound like locally installed DBs are going the way of the mainframe and nothing can be further from the truth.  There will be DBAs at companies for decades to come and if the time ever comes when I absolutely *have* to make the jump to Azure, then I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.  Until then, the only word I have for you true believers is this… don’t believe everything you hear from MS marketing.  And just because they came up with something you think is cool, don’t think it’s going to be the only game in town. 

Besides, the cloud is mostly a marketing joke anyway.  The other word for the cloud is the internet.  And there have been hosted services on the internet for a long time now.  This is nothing new.  So when you see these commercials talking about taking advantage of the cloud, just remember that it’s just the internet.  I’ve been buying books in the cloud for years.  And I’ve had my website hosted in the cloud for years too.  And remember that new thing they came out with a couple months ago?  Apparently now they can host your email for you on special websites so you can get to it anywhere.  Wow, imagine that… email in the cloud.  What will they think of next?