Strangely enough, there are time when I talk about things that aren’t directly related to security and yesterday’s guest appearance on the Uhuru podcast was one of these. In fact “the cloud” is something I’m deeply interested in and have spent a lot of time thinking about and working with lately, one significant of example of which has been the use of AppHarbor for hosting ASafaWeb.

Yesterday I had a short chat to Michael Surkan from Uhuru Software on how I was adapting to the new world cloud order and particularly what I like about the AppHarbor offering. I’d had some involvement with the Azure in the very early days and made the decision to choose AppHarbor about a year back so hopefully those timeframes put some of my comments in context (but I’m sure people more knowledgeable about Azure than me will call me on the inevitable mistakes in what I said!). This is now up on the Uhuru website:

Listen: Not all .NET roads lead to Microsoft 

We had a good chat offline afterwards and one thing that really stuck out is the number of players entering the cloud market and the different angles they’re approaching IaaS / PaaS / SaaS from. It’s great news for those of us on the development side as we can choose from a much broader range of app hosting models than we ever had access to before. Offerings such as Azure are a very different paradigm to the likes of AppHarbor which is very different again to what you get from the Amazon offerings. Good times to be a developer!