Yep, Kep…it’s all going to be about workflows!

“Well, you know, if it’s enough already, and I just wanna get some sleep.”  Kramer, Seinfeld, “The Mango”

As my son, George, now transitions from 7th to 8th grade and he is on the verge of turning 13, I have now become his personal math tutor (which in itself has become a small battle of two opposing wills).  George thinks I have this really irritating habit of just thinking about too many details!  He’s looking for that one word answer and some memorization trick to sooth his understanding. But, he is not going to get that from me. He is right about one thing, when I sink my teeth and mind into some technical foray, I do not like to leave any stones unturned. Now I don’t want to leave the wrong impression, George is a smart kid, not because he has some superior genes, but because he has parents that run a tight ship with regard to his studies.  I’ve laid my favorite Lombardi quote on him more than he likes to hear, and until I feel that he’s finally “got it” in math, he’ll continue to hear it a lot more.

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.”

It kind of reminds me of my grad school days at Georgia Tech and a conversation between me and Professor Monson Hayes at the end of his Advanced Digital Signal Processing course.  I said to Professor Hayes at the time that I thought I had finally turned the corner on the mathematical theory of random processes. He promptly reminded me to not be so quick; he personally didn’t feel he had actually understood probability and random processes until after the 3rd time he had taught the course. This week, I got that same sort of sick, yet gleeful, feeling when another level of light came on in my head about cloud services and workflows.

Clearly, at the risk of dating myself, I still love those old Seinfeld reruns. In a scene of one of my favorite episodes, “The Mango”, in their usual demented manner, Jerry gets on this topic of “faking it”.  While it’s hard for Jerry to get a grasp of Elaine always “faking it” with him, he really gets whacked out when Kramer tells him, that he’s “faked it”!  What? But, why? Kramer says, “Well you know, if it’s enough already, and I just wanna get some sleep.”

"Well, you know, if it's enough already, and I just wanna get some sleep."

Which brings me to my own personal technical demons that I have exorcised over the years, of which I am going to excoriate a couple of in this blog entry. I’m going to first come clean and say outright, that I’ve faked it on cloud workflows!  I know it may have sounded like the real thing a few blogs ago, but without knowing it, I “faked it”.

It’s not that I have been off in the weeds on this subject. In fact, in the case of the importance of workflows in cloud services, I knew where the weeds were that I wanted to trounce around in, I just didn’t know I was strolling in a huge field of dandelions that were 6′ tall!

Workflows, weeds & cloudy skies...beauty is in the eyes of the beholder

This is what has kind of happened to me in my perception of workflows in cloud services. I was really having fun blogging about how design methodology workflows and WorkFlow-as-a-Service (WFaaS) is certain to become a centralized tenant in cloud services.  But, the reality is that I had just decided to “fake” the ending, letting everyone know how great this workflow stuff is, without really EXPERIENCING how great this workflow stuff can be! I just wanted “to get some sleep”, and “it was enough already.”  But it’s not “enough already”, and I’m now ready to REALLY write about what we’re going to see in the field of WorkFlow-as-a-Service (WFaaS) in cloud services…

More on this to come…

"Now, be a good cloud, sit down and eat your workflows! They're good for you!"