When I was in school for my undergraduate degree, I really disliked calculus. Maybe it was the calculations we were required to complete, or that it hadn't yet "clicked" for me how the concepts would have an impact on my daily life. But now I'm amused by how often I apply the most fundamental tenet of calculus in my work for clients: understanding change.

With Dewberry's WSCA contract now available, we're quickly changing how we help clients take their IT infrastructure to the cloud. And in doing so, I've been thinking a lot about how rates of change and scenarios that can impact a clients' system drive the decisions we make during system design—not to mention how the Cloud has a major impact on these decisions.

For instance, if an organization architects a system to accommodate "X" number of users in a peak environment, cloud infrastructure can scale up or down to meet peak and normal user loads. Collecting, analyzing, and applying this rate-of-change information is critical in moving successfully into a cloud environment, as well as determining load balancing, disaster recovery strategies, and networking for security purposes. This dynamic and scalable environment is what makes migrating to the cloud so worthwhile.

We've implemented tools at Dewberry that help us design cloud systems that only use resources that are needed, helping save money on infrastructure. Using the rate of change principles, these tools help understand the minimum infrastructure requirements, the anticipated scaling that will need to take place with projected increases in usage, and the expected time of implementation for additional infrastructure.