A Take On Cloud Computing

     There is that buzz going around about cloud computing and the benefits it has to offer for the small and large businesses who may not have the computer memory storage capacity or the bandwidth with the faster speeds at their facility to do their data crunching.

     Testing software and running customer simulations from different angles to foresee any problems that may arise before their particular brand of service goes public, takes A) storage capacity and B) appropriate bandwidth for the faster transference rate between the customer input and the company’s servers.

      Cloud Computing seemed like such a novel concept to many entrepreneurs when it first became available that they had skepticism about the safety of their timely and sometimes sensitive data.  At one seminar that I was privy to, the sales rep for a cloud computing facility answered the safety question by saying that the company could encrypt their data before uploading it to the cloud computing facility for processing.

     Chelsea Dale in my short story titled “Cloud Computing’ has landed an Internet business project entailing the handling of greeting card traffic.  She will be responsible for creating software that will catalogue the different cards, tagging them with appropriate discount codes and generally making them available to the public via the Internet.

     Chelsea has a particular style to her programming known to a few select gurus as that must-have-a-staging-platform-first-style.  She has to have one particular address in her memory cache to review incoming fresh data or even existing older data.  She will interrupt the flow of her programming processing just to examine a particular variable or dataset.

     A greeting card discounted at 10% off might catch Chelsea’s eye for examination for example, and at some point in her software program, she will pull the tag name for that card – say it’s called NostalgicCard_11056 and put it say in the memory compartment 0x20f86 to test to make sure that it passes all integrity rules (from it being a black and white card, to being properly discounted) under stressful programming conditions and scenarios.

     In the short story “Cloud Computing,” I don’t go into as much detail into Chelsea’s must-have-a-staging-platform-first-style of programming and I instead focus on the fact that she was nervous about the whole aspect of entrusting her greeting card data to cloud computing people.

     Timothy London, the sales representative for CloudPresence.com (a fictitious company in my story) is very personable and confident about his company’s Internet services and he wants Chelsea to become as informed as possible about cloud computing, so she doesn’t feel as if she’s signing her life away when she signs on the dotted line.

     This is a very darling short story that has elements of computer software engineering complete with that entrepreneurial can-do attitude built in.  Cloud Computing gives Chelsea a second chance by offering her the storage capacity and transference bandwidth rate to test aspects of her software as she launches an Internet Greeting Card site for a client from her home office.