"The Cloud” – the ubiquitous, ambiguous, and amorphous solution for IT. Well maybe or maybe not.
This post is my own opinions, thoughts, and ideas. It is not intended to represent the opinions, thoughts, ideas, statistics or any other information from my employer or any other group. Feel free to send me comments, suggestions, or feedback.
Thinking About Using the cloud? Maybe you should, but make sure you are looking in the right direction.
Understanding what you need, what you are trying to attain, how you are going to use it, and how you are going to manage it are important questions to understand for success in the cloud. Failure to identify the answers to each of these questions has led failed cloud initiatives.
What do you need? The cloud provide services. We tend to define those services based on what we have in a data center: infrastructure, applications, and platforms. These break down to even smaller service areas: infrastructure includes computing, storage, and networks; applications includes monitoring, content, correlation, communication, and finance; and platforms includes databases, queues, runtime, objects, and identity. There are even smaller services available, but these provide examples of some of the detail that needs to be understood before jumping into cloud services. Understanding what services you need is important so that you purchase the right services.
What are you trying to attain? Typically, I like to break this question into 5 areas – cost, availability, scalability, performance, and accessibility. Each of these areas are drivers for cloud services, but in every cloud decision they must be evaluated to ensure that the right mix and balance is attained.
Cost – We’ve all seen the ads and heard the sales pitches touting cost savings in cloud computing, but there may not be cost savings if our real driver is one of the other areas. Costs can be more or less depending on the other areas. If reducing cost is the main driver, we may have to give up performance, availability, or some of the other areas to attain the cost savings.
Availability – We assume that the services will be available 24x7 in the cloud. That may be attainable, but at what cost, at what performance, at what limit of scalability? We need to define our goal for availability and understand that every system, whether cloud or data center, requires maintenance that may affect availability.
Scalability – Being able to quickly add or remove services may be the goal. If so, what is the cost, how is accessibility affected, and how does it affect performance? Rapid scalability may be important for a development environment, but may be less important for a production environment that doesn’t require rapid change.
Performance – Being able to achieve the processing power and storage necessary to operate our systems at the speed of the business may be important. If so, at what cost, what level of access, and what availability?
Accessibility – Being able to access our information from anywhere may be important. How is performance, cost, and scalability affected to achieve this level of access?
Think about these 5 areas as interconnected sliders. None of them are unlimited, and if we increase one, we may have to decrease one or more of the others.
How are you going to manage it? Yes, the cloud service provider is going to manage some of the “back-end” functions for the service that you purchase. However, you need to understand what those back-end functions are and ensure that all of the functions you need are being managed and monitored. Just because you use a cloud service doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay attention to it. Making sure that the services you purchased are operating at the level that you contracted is your responsibility.
Additionally, you need to identify all of the functions that are essential for the services you are purchasing. For example if you are using cloud services for sensitive information, you need to make sure that there are appropriate security and privacy controls in place. If the service provider doesn’t provide those functions themselves, you will need to manage those functions or find another service provider that can provide those functions for you. Either way, you now need to monitor those functions in addition to the services being provide by the original service provider.
