Poem: Partly Cloudy

As any reader of this site knows we're huge huge supporters of the arts. To continue that theme here's a visionary poem by Mason Hale. Few have reached for inspiration and found their muse in the emotional maelstrom that is cloud computing, but Mason has and the results speak for themselves: Partly Cloudy We have a dream A vision An aspiration To compute in the cloud To pay as we go To drink by the sip To add cores at our whim To write to disks with no end To scale up with demand And scale down when it ends Elasticity Scalability Redundancy Computing as a utility This is our dream Becoming reality But… There’s a hitch. There’s a bump in the road There’s a twist in the path There’s a detour ahead on the way to achieving our goal It’s the Database Our old friend He is set in his ways He deals in transactions to keeps things consistent He maintains the integrity of all his relations He eats disks for breakfast He hungers for RAM He loves queries and joins, and gives each one a plan He likes his schemas normal and strict His changes are atomic That is his schtick He’s an old friend as I said We all know him well So it pains me to say that in this new-fangled cloud He doesn’t quite fit Don’t get me wrong, our friend can scale as high as you want But there’s a price to be paid That expands as you grow The cost is complexity It’s more things to maintain More things that can go wrong More ways to inflict pain On the poor DBA who cares for our friend The one who backs him up and, if he dies, restores him again I love our old friend I know you do too But it is time for us all to own up to the fact That putting him into the cloud Taking him out of the rack Just causes us both more pain and more woe So… It’s time to move on Time to learn some new tricks Time to explore a new world that is less ACIDic It’s time to meet some new friends Those who were born in the cloud Who are still growing up Still figuring things out There’s Google’s BigTable and Werner’s SimpleDB There’s Hive and HBase and Mongo and Couch There’s Cassandra and Drizzle And not to be left out There’s Vertica and Aster if you want to spend for support There’s a Tokyo Cabinet and something called Redis I’m told It’s a party, a playgroup of newborn DB’s They scale and expand, they re-partition with ease They are new and exciting And still flawed to be sure But they’ll learn and improve, grow and mature They are our future We developers should take heed If our databases can change, then maybe Just maybe So can we

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