Why you need to move to the Cloud
The first public Cloud platform service was introduced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in March 2006. Since then, many players have joined the market to offer a full range of services, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) among the most popular. While AWS remains the leader of the market, Microsoft and Google are seeing increased growth and could catch up to Amazon if it won’t keep innovating. This positive competitive market can only benefit the customers.
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| Public Cloud Worldwide Revenue Forecast 2018-2022 in Billion USD |
Benefits of the Cloud over on-premise
Whether you are a small, medium or large enterprise, you may already have Websites hosted at a service provider, or your employees are using office tools such as Microsoft Office 365, or your custom applications are transferring data with external suppliers through hosted storage. These examples are use of Cloud services chosen by your company to lower costs or minimize administrative effort from maintaining your own infrastructure.
On premise expenses include cost of software licenses, server and network hardware, their power and cooling, the space they occupy, the personnel and maintenance. Moving to the Cloud will eliminate those operating expenditures. The Cloud platform pay-as-you-go pricing model allows you to easily adapt to your continuously evolving business needs without overcommitting budgets.
A few scenarios:
Were you planning a major project but were held back due to the estimated infrastructure capital expenditures your company would incur? Public Cloud provides the agility to spin-up resources easily without initial spending.
Is your report taking way too long to produce following a spike in volume? Public Cloud services are elastic and can easily scale-up to meet your demands.
Are your servers running 24/7 despite being accessed by users during work hours only? On the public Cloud you could easily shut them down during off hours or pay only for usage, depending on the service, hence cost savings.
Are your software versions months or years behind the latest update? Public Cloud offerings either Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) will ensure their underlying software is up-to-date for features, optimization and security.
Designing custom applications could require large capital and operational expenditures as they require server and network infrastructure, specialized tools and licenses, skilled personnel to design, develop and maintain. With SaaS or PaaS products you can quickly start to build your personalized solution and cost will scale with your volume, meaning small enterprises will always pay less than larger enterprises.
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| Worldwide Cloud 2019 Market Share in Billion USD and increase from previous year |
Why choose public Cloud?
The definitive answer is to benefit from economies of scale, a massive pool of resources instantly available on pay-as-you-go, no extra cost, providing the agility you need to quickly start your IT initiative, being charged for compute, data storage or execution time.
To give you an idea of the pricing (all amounts are in USD), AWS storage service will charge you $0.023 per GB per Month for the first 50 TB, and price per GB goes down the more storage you use. With a durability of 99.999999999%, you will never find this level of reliability on premise or at private hosting services. Public Clouds have so many data centers, availability zones spread across multiple regions that storage space is by far the least expensive and most reliable resource.
Compute specific services such as AWS functions that execute custom code are charged by the number of requests and duration; $0.20 per 1M requests, $0.0000166667 for every GB-second, but also increases with memory allocation.
If you allocated 512MB of memory to your function, executed it 3 million times in one month, and it ran for 1 second each time, the Total charges = Compute charges + Request charges = $18.34 + $0.40 = $18.74 per month
VM, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will still cost less than on-premise, but are not the optimal solutions. To fully benefit from public Cloud, you should rely solely on PaaS and SaaS offerings, such as Azure SQL services; consider to migrate all your IaaS as much as possible. Although database services, which combine compute and storage resources, are more expensive than simple storage or function services, they are much more performance and cost efficient than on VM.
For example, a managed Azure SQL instance with 8 vCore, 1.2 TB and 300 hours of activity would cost just under $750 per month, backup included. One vCore Gen5 is equivalent to one hyper-thread on an Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3-GHz and Intel SP-8160 (Skylake) processors, fast NVMe SSD.
Public Cloud massive infrastructure provides elastic computing, which is the ability to quickly scale processing power, memory and storage resources to meet your demands, and load balance your applications. Elasticity is typically automated without intervention or having to worry about purchasing and maintaining additional equipment.
Due to their exposure, public Clouds invest heavily into securing their infrastructure end-to-end, including hardware, software and operations. Microsoft has over 3,500 security experts and invests more than $1 B annually on cybersecurity. Public Clouds also meet major global or industry standard certifications and compliances.
Why not choose a public Cloud?
If you are a small enterprise and rent services from a private hosting company with no forecast for growth whatsoever, such as static Website or limited databases without IT employees doing maintenance, then you may not benefit financially from moving to a public Cloud. Many private hosting services have adjusted their pricing for small enterprises who have no need for resilient or scalable platforms.
A major concern is Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and their compliance with government regulation. Several countries have strict rules on their citizen data residency location. It is important to understand those regulations and the data your company stores. Public Cloud owns infrastructure across many geographical locations but not in every country. Be sure to look up the following pages if this is a concern for your company. In addition to meeting compliance, choosing the right location could see benefit from improved latency time.
AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/?p=ngi&loc=2
Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/geographies/
In order to store securely PII data on public Cloud, you will need to follow the best practices for securing your virtual network, sensitive data and encryption; although this applies to on premise as well.
Which Cloud to choose?
The top Cloud platforms offer similar services, covering the most popular needs, but each has their pros and cons that may determine which is a better fit, depending on your current IT infrastructure and technology. This section will focus solely on the current top 2 players, AWS and Azure.
After 14 years, AWS is the most mature platform with the most stable offerings. Azure launched 10 years ago, it is still going through a lot of changes and its services keep evolving. By the end of 2019, Azure SQL Data Warehouse was redesigned and renamed Azure Synapse Analytics, which would have impact your data analytics systems implementation if you were using that service.
If your enterprise relies mainly on Microsoft ecosystem, from Windows O/S, MS Office tools, Windows and SQL server to .Net applications you may think Azure would be de-facto choice, however AWS also provide managed Microsoft Active Directory Service which is key for seamless security management for enterprise on Windows O/S. AWS also support most if not all Microsoft technology. For Web applications, AWS supports .Net among other popular frameworks such as Java, PHP, Python, just like Azure.
Since databases are becoming the most business critical asset for most companies, the deciding factor may come down to which database engine is used across your systems; this decision will be impacted by staff skills and applications connectivity. For enterprises mainly relying on Microsoft SQL Server databases, Azure platform will provide a seamless transition, while AWS primary database engine is MySQL; both support Oracle.
Those platforms provide multiple Cloud management and automation tools. Their interfaces are unique and could also be a deciding factor. With free trial options available, make sure to ask your leading staff to explore their features as you need to consider an organization-wide strategy to structure your Cloud architecture and the basis differs slightly between AWS and Azure.
Feature-wise, both public Cloud platforms are highly capable to cover your business and technical needs. As previously mentioned, staff skills and learning curve will be a determining factor. A proper inventory of all your company technological assets and people skills is a prerequisite to identify which Cloud will be most suitable. Of course, the transition must be planned by phases to limit impact on business continuity. For now, I hope you learnt something from this article and that I instilled your interest in public Cloud technology.
- Eric Chan
References
Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 17% in 2020
Cloud market share Q4 2019 and full-year 2019
AWS Lambda Pricing
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
Overview of Azure SQL Managed Instance resource limits
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/managed-instance/resource-limits
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