Continuing with the analogy of electricity, if your company decided to build a new motor or machine that would be driven by electricity you would likely build it to utilize the service that is commonly available. ie. 230 Volts, Single Phase, Alternating Current. You might choose something different if you had a particular need but it would be unusual to specify some random voltage just because you can. Also if you had multiple electricity suppliers are available you MAY not want ton tie yourself to a specific provider unless there is a clear benefit.
So it is with Cloud Computing. If we think of Cloud as simply a bunch of servers off site then we are missing 95% of the benefits. we could just lift and shift our existing server estate and provision it from a Cloud Service Provider but that is unimaginative and prosaic.
The right approach is “embrace” Cloud. This will necessitate a complete change of mind set within your current IT world!
One reason for this is that Cloud Services are charged for by the minute or by the hour (depending on some basic choices) and therefore you should only build EXACTLY what you need to consume. Most servers only operate at a small fraction of their capacity for most of a day. Traditional server estates are designed to be much larger than needed to be able to cope with spikes in demand. Cloud Servers should be stopped when they are not being used and therefore you wont need to pay for them. It wouldn’t make sense to have someone on standby to start and stop machines when needed either. So therefore all Cloud Services SHOULD be consumed programmatically!
Once we have taken that important leap in understanding we are well on the way to EMBRACING rather than USING Cloud. In my next post I will get to IaC to describe why this is such a BIG THING. 🙂
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