Public Cloud: All Aboard the Hype Train

We’ve all heard it before.

“The cloud is the future!”

“We need to move to the cloud!”

“The on-premises data center is dead.”

If you believe the analysts and marketing departments, public cloud is the greatest thing to happen to the data center since virtualization. But, is it true? Could public cloud be the savior of the IT department? While many features to the public cloud make it an attractive infrastructure replacement, failure to adequately plan for its use can prove to be a costly mistake.

Moving past the marketing, the cloud is simply “someone else’s computer.” Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but when you boil it down to the basics, it’s a data center maintained by a third-party with proprietary software on top to provide an easy-to-use dashboard for provisioning and monitoring. When you move to the cloud, you’re still running an application on a server. Many of the same problems you have with your application running on-premises can persist in the cloud.

In a public cloud environment, the added complexity of multi-tenancy on the underlying resources can complicate things. Now you have to think about regulatory compliance? And after all, public cloud is still a data center subject to human error. This has been made evident over and over, famously by the Amazon Web Services S3 outage of February 2017.* The wide adoption of public clouds such as AWS and Microsoft Azure has also opened the door to more instances of shadow IT. Rogue devs, admins, and end users who either don’t have the patience to wait or have been denied resources opening cloud accounts with their own credit cards and putting corporate data at risk. And, we have yet to even take into consideration the consumption-based billing model.

Even with the above listed “issues” (I put quotes around issues as some of the problems can be encountered in the private cloud or worked around), public cloud can be an awesome tool in the IT administrator’s toolbox. Properly architected cloud-based applications can alleviate performance issues and can be developed with robust redundancies to avoid downtime. The ability to quickly scale compute up and down based on demand provides the business amazing agility not before seen in the standard data center procurement cycle. And, the growing world of SaaS products provides an easy gateway to enter the cloud (yes, I’m going to take the stance that as-a-Service qualifies as cloud). The introduction of cloud technologies has also opened a world of new application deployment models such as microservices and serverless computing. These amazing ways of looking at infrastructure weren’t possible until recently.

Is there hype around public cloud? For sure! Is some of it warranted? Absolutely! Is it the be-all and end-all technology of the future? Not so fast. In the upcoming series of posts I’m calling “Battle of the Clouds,” we’ll look at public cloud versus private cloud, going past the hype to dive into the state of on-premises data centers, what it takes for a successful cloud implementation, and workload planning around both solutions. I look forward to hearing your opinions on this topic as well!

*Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region