Time For A Cloud Based Infrastructure

I wonder why many small to medium and even enterprise establishments are still arguing the importance of moving their infrastructure over the cloud!

Usually, it is easier to convince the owners and upper managers of an organization and educate them about the benefits of cloud based infrastructure. The actual resistance usually comes from the operations working task force. Staff well trained and experienced using traditional infrastructure tools to configure, operate, and maintain infrastructure elements either are lazy enough not to leave their comfort zone to learn new technologies and tools, or resisting such movements fearing to lose their jobs.

The actual reality about cloud based infrastructure is that it offers a tremendous value compared to the costs incurred. The current traditional information technology infrastructure utilizes virtualization to allow reducing space and power costs required to host servers, storage, and networking devices. Yet, it did not really contribute much to easing the operational efforts needed to maintain the data centers and hosted applications.

Moving IT infrastructure to a cloud based one either fully managed or privately owned and managed shall not only reduce operational costs, but also relieve operations staff from lots of headache.

Just to mention some, let me list down some of the potential benefits that operations staff will realize when their organizations adapt to cloud based infrastructure:

1. Reducing human error via tested scripted machine launching, scaling, and terminating
2. Faster response to resource allocation requirements utilizing automated scripted machine creation, scaling, and termination tools
3. Ability to respond to peak time loads by configuring horizontal auto scalability both at the machine resources and application instances levels
4. Ability to share common CPU, RAM memory, and storage resources among solutions and systems coming from different vendors and using different technologies
5. Having the luxury of monitoring the overall infrastructure including hardware and software using automated cloud based logging and monitoring tools
6. Having less time tackling configuration issues and more time responding to end users needs in a relaxed atmosphere that is free of stress and panic
7. Having the courage to build and destroy whole development, test, and production environments in a fast and furious fashion where both building and retiring environments is an exciting task that has no fear of losing any data or configuration parameters.
8. Having overall control over the actual costs of running an IT infrastructure through on demand resource allocation.

Some might argue that the learning curve to get into the cloud based world is nit encouraging. That also is not true! Anyone, literally anyone, can get an account on AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, IBM cloud , or any other similar true cloud providers. Once an account is established it takes few steps to start launching and building fully managed environments. Step by step, and day after day, you will find yourself capable of building beautiful scripts that allow you to bring to live many environments at a pre-calculated and pre-estimated cost.

Fear no more and go ahead try one of those reputable cloud providers before trying to build your own on premise privately managed cloud.