A bit of background – I have been working with a sizeable (Petabyte scale) on-premise setup for 10+ years. As a responsible manager – there was a struggle between external trends (e.g. Cloud will rule everything) and coming from the Open Source world where it is very transparent that most of what AWS provides is just an “apt or yum” away. In this post I’ll try to share a few perspectives.
Elasticity
Cloud is fantastic when it comes elasticity – If you have a need of 10.000 cpu-cores for just a few hours. Peak demands and bulk workloads where business processes are actually waiting for the results and it can speed up your R&D and eventually bring your product faster to market – then the case is pretty clear – you could even calculate it by figuring out what a week or two faster to market will do to your NPV estimation of your new product.
Agility
It is pretty awesome – with a credit-card in the one hand and a mouse in the other you can easily have infrastructure running close to your end users at all continents on the planet – probably before end of working day.
Security
Remember the CIA’s of security? The setups provided by cloud vendors deliver in terms of (A)vailability a setup that is very hard and costly to establish from ground up. I wont go into details with the (C)onfindentiality and (I)ntegrity in the cloud setups – as that would be a complete series of posts by themselves.
Cost
The first fix is free – AWS Free Tier is absolutely fantastic – you get the option of – at zero cost – to take most of the infrastructure for a run – If you havent done it allready – I really suggest you to do so – it is a very pleasant experience.
Second – when scaling up/out and getting sizeable data sizes in the 100TB+ or more – then AWS can actually become a significant cost-driver – depending on how the alternatives look – cost seem to be at least 3x higher – sometimes more than 10x – depending on where you are with your business – then that may actually make a difference.
Managed services
The managed services provided by AWS (and others) are really helpfull – example – a global relational database – scalable to 64TB with auto-scaling on the read-replica side. It do take at lease 1-2 very skilled internal people to maintain something similar.
Summary
The cloud is mature, scalable, robust and for some workloads/applications it delivers things that are very, very hard to achieve differently.
If you have:
- Elastic need (Black friday peaks or other very dynamic workloads)
- Need for agility/speed – or lack of outlook for future needs.
- Can overview the costs.
Then I strongly suggest you go have a look. If you care about the C and I above – Cloud may be at your benefit – or the other way around – there is a need to evaluate.
On the other hand – if you’re sitting at scale and already concerned with your internal costs – then moving to the cloud may very well be a move in the wrong direction for you.
As an example: queue-it.net (Web based queuing system for busy websites) – is a very strong fit to AWS – as it truly benefits from the elasticity.
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