Many organizations today if they have not already established a public cloud presence are looking to shift resources to the cloud. However, is it only a romanticism with the idea of public cloud, or is there real business benefits to public cloud? One of the driving reasons behind moving to public cloud is it allows organizations to be much more agile when it comes to infrastructure. Placing resources in public cloud negates the capital expense as well as time involved to build out all the physical infrastructure that would be required to turn up new environments. It also allows the flexibility to be elastic when it comes to infrastructure. Resources can be spun up and then spun back down as business demands grow, shrink, or otherwise change. However, what is some considerations for migrating resources to the public cloud? Which public cloud do you choose? What are the challenges in migrating resources?
Where are my public cloud savings?
There is certainly a misconception surrounding costs and perceived savings when it comes to running resources in the public cloud. Many mistakenly think that simply moving all resources from on-premises physical infrastructure to the public cloud is going to net tremendous savings. While there are certain workloads that make sense when it comes to housing in public cloud, simply moving all resources to the public cloud may not save money and in fact could be more expensive than housing those resources on premise or in an organization’s private cloud. Public cloud providers generally charge based on the usage of resources. Simply moving a “cookie cutter” copy of the on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud most likely will not be efficient from a cost perspective.
For example, application services on-premise might reside on multiple VMs in an inefficient manner. On-premise we would not see much cost difference between running 2 VMs or 10 VMs and a very liberal assignment of resources. However, we could see a major difference in the cost of public cloud resources designed in the same manner. The takeaway from this is that moving infrastructure resources to the public cloud requires that organizations rethink their application design and frontend and/or backend resources and their layout. Not all applications or services in their current on-premise state may make sense to move to public cloud infrastructure.
Which public cloud?
This can be an interesting question for many organizations. For most, the first public cloud that comes to mind is Amazon. Many CIOs will take a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and see Amazon leading the pack. Truthfully, there really are only the big three when it comes to the public cloud leaders – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Cloud.
Amazon certainly has the lead in maturity and services available as they are the longest standing consumable public cloud. However, Microsoft with Azure has made giant steps forward in services and features available in their rapidly maturing cloud. Microsoft of course has great inroads in the enterprise environment as many enterprise environments run Microsoft server, client operating systems, and back office products. Office 365 has had strong adoption as well in the enterprise for both Office products and enterprise email. Another incentive that Microsoft holds out to enterprise customers with Enterprise License Agreements is free Azure credits that are basically free money that enterprises can use to kick the tires on Microsoft Azure with various workloads. This can appeal to many enterprise environments to steer towards the Microsoft Azure cloud since they have already bought into that ecosystem. Google Compute Cloud has gained traction in some circles, however, Google is definitely playing catchup in the public cloud space. They have a lot of ground to make up even in the number three slot of the magic quadrant. Google’s offering has been attractive on the pricing side as well which has helped in customer adoption.
At the end of the day however, all of the big three cloud providers have strengths and weaknesses that need to be looked at on a case by case basis. In some situations, it may make more sense to go with Amazon AWS, and others, especially if an enterprise is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft Azure. There may be incentives to invest in Google Compute Cloud for some. Each business case and needs will be different and cloud vendors need to be considered based on those needs.
Also, each public cloud offering has their own set of services and tooling to interact with those services and features. There will always be some sort of public cloud vendor lock in if applications are built to rely on specific features, functionality, or APIs provided by a particular public cloud. Organizations must think differently about how applications are designed and how these are accessed.
Which applications or services?
If an organization has weighed their options and decides to move workloads or services to the public cloud, which workloads or environments make the most sense especially in the beginning stages? One of the strongest use cases and perhaps most fitting applications of public cloud resources is any development, staging, or test environments. Due to their volatile and ephemeral nature, most development, staging, or test environments are spun up and spun down and don’t have to run constantly. Since charges are incurred with cloud providers based on usage, development, staging, and test environments are a great example of infrastructure that may be best suited for the public cloud environment.
Instead of investing in hardware and other infrastructure to run these types of environments, it can make more sense to simply provision these in the public cloud and turn on and off as needed. The expensive on-premise physical infrastructure can then be put to better use running other workloads besides development, staging, and test environments.
Once an organization has their feet wet with development environments, they can then start looking at production systems and figuring out which applications make most sense to design or redesign in a way that is cloud native.
Many have found the hard way that certain legacy or custom written applications that work well on-premise, do not work well in the public cloud. There may be certain infrastructure dependencies and or network related dependencies that create issues for those applications that may not have been understood or thought of before making the switch to public cloud. This underscores the importance that organizations proceed in a methodical and well tested manner before making the switch to public cloud hosting for certain applications.
There are certain software offerings or services that generally make sense to move to the public cloud such as email as an example. Many organizations today no longer choose to host email on-premise. Many popular services such as Microsoft’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based Office365 cloud email offerings provide a powerful way to host business critical services such as email in a much more redundant and scalable way than could be achieved hosting these services on premise.
Thoughts
There is certainly an appeal for most organizations to move resources and workloads to public cloud infrastructure. However, there are challenges and costs associated that can make organizations rethink the need to move to public cloud at least in some cases. Using the public cloud for development, staging, or test environments is a good way for organizations to see real benefits from using cloud resources as opposed to on-premise infrastructure and it allows them to test various features and functionality of a particular cloud offering before moving production resources there. There is no question that legacy applications or services housed on-premise may need to be revisited and/or reengineered in such a way that the application functions as expected in the public cloud. One thing is for sure, public cloud is not going away and if an organization is not utilizing the public cloud now, they most likely will be in the near future. Agility, scalability, features, and functionality that public cloud offerings provide to organizations will only get stronger. It will continue to make more and more sense for organizations to give a serious look to public cloud infrastructure.
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