CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE CLOUD
Recently, everything has been "pushed up into the cloud". Simply put, the "cloud" is just using someone else's computers rather than your own. This is extremely attractive to many companies because it provides benefits such as:
- No upfront capital investment
- No recurring capital investment
- Almost too good to be true monthly cost -- Hire an inexpensive node for under $30 a month -- licensing and all!
But as always, the devil is in the details. A couple of large organisations have experienced significant outages due to issues with what are considered top-tier cloud hosting providers such as RackSpace and Amazon AWS to name a few (click for details).
Businesses must remain vigilant when transitioning into cloud based systems. After all, you cannot expect to pay only $30 per month for supreme high availability and fault tolerance.
These "cloud instances" are really to be treated as unimportant, inexpensive nodes. IaaS (Infrastructure-As-A-Service) providers simply provide the raw infrastructure components -- the compute nodes and the storage. It's up to the businesses using these components to build HA into their infrastructure or application.
Once you factor in all this, the cost of going "into the cloud" can increase considerably. Alternatively, it may be that selecting a provider with highly available hosting (albeit at a greater OpEx) is the more cost-effective option.
Businesses transitioning into the cloud should aim to use at least two or more providers (for e.g. Microsoft Azure & Amazon AWS) simultaneously and spread out infrastructure evenly across the two (or more) providers. This way, your app or service is resilient to even large scale outages that impact an entire provider (As it did with RackSpace back in September 2014).
Contact us now to find out how we can accelerate your cloud migration or provide fast, highly available local hosting.
[email protected] or (09) 280 3720