Keep it simple, stupid

Cloud Middleware is the logical evolution of traditional middleware solutions: making them available as a service, reducing complexity, readily increasing adoptability, and eliminating the need for new infrastructure. Unfortunately, a majority of cloud offerings simply take traditional solutions and begin hosting them. By making a solution hosted in-the-cloud, they succeed in eliminating a developer’s or company’s need to buy new infrastructure to run it, but they utterly fail to fulfill a fundamental promise of the cloud operating system model – reducing complexity. It is still the same old, complex solution - just not running on your servers.

Cloud Middleware providers should not just host the same old stuff. They need to re-architect their solutions and make them available as an easy-to-use service, not just as-a-service. In order to increase adoptability of these traditional middleware solutions, the intended audience (engineers, developers, designers) should be able to pick it up and run with it, mastering its use in a very short period of time (a day or less seems reasonable). They don’t want to have to learn or understand all of the great complexities of what the service solves for them. They want to quickly implement it and get back to focusing on the core value proposition of what they are creating.

The only way developers will be able to truly leverage all the benefits of cloud middleware is if the services available to them obfuscate the complexities of using them – this is what will open more doors for the innovators of today and tomorrow.

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