The Public Cloud

A couple of years ago nobody really thought of Public cloud (although that might be different in the US), but things change, quickly. Since the AWS invasion of the public clo space we’ve seen a lot competitors try to win their share in this lucrative market. Lucrative is a well chosen word here as most of the businesses getting into this market take a big leap of faith, as most of them have to take their losses for the first couple of years. But why should Public Cloud be of any interest to you, and what are the things you need to think about? Let’s take a plane and fly to see what the public cloud has to offfer, and if it will take over the complete datacenter or just parts of it?

Most companies have only one purpose and that is to make more money then they spend… And where prices are under pressure there is really nly one thing to do, cut the cost. A lot of companies see the public cloud as cutting cost, as you’re only paying for the resources you use, and not for all the other stuff that is alsoo needed to run your own “private cloud”. And because of this they think the cost of public cloud is cheaper than building their datacenters every 5 years or so.

To be honest, in a lot of ways the companies are right. Cutting cost by moving certain workloads to the public cloud will certainly help to cut cost, but it might also be a great test/dev environment. The thing is you need to determine the best public cloud strategy per company, and it might even be needed to do it per department (in particular cases). But saying everything will be in the public cloud is a bridge to far for many companies…. At the moment.

A lot of companies are already doing loads of workloads in the public cloud, without even really understanding it. Microsoft Office 365 (and in particular outlook) is one the examples where a lot of companies use public cloud, sometimes even without really looking into the details and if it is allowed by law. Yes, that’s right going public you need to think of even what can and what can’t be put in the cloud. Some companies are prohibited to by national law to put certain parts of their data in a public cloud, so make sure to look for everything before telling your company or customer to go public.

Most companies choose a gentle path towards public cloud, and choose the right workloads to go public. This is the right way to do if you’re an established company with your own way, but than again you need to not only think of your own, but also about the law that your company needs to follow.

In my last post on Private Cloud I mentioned the DART framework, as I think it is an important tool to go cloud (private at first, but Public also). In this post on Public Cloud I want to go for the SOAR framework.

Security - In a Public Cloud environment it really important to Secure your data. IT should make sure the Public part(s) as well as the Private part(s) are well secured and all data is save. Governance, compliancy and more should be well thought of, and re-thought of every step of the way.

Optimization - the IT infrastructure is a key component in a fast changing world. As I already mentioned a lot of companies are looking to do more for less to get more profit. IT should be an enabler for the business, not some sort of firefighters.

Automation - is the key to faster deployments. It’s the foundation for continuous delivery and other DevOps practices. Automation enforces consistency across your development, testing and production environments, and ensures you can quickly orchestrate changes throughout your infrastructure: bare metal servers, virtual machines, cloud and container deployments. In the end automation is a key component for optimization

Reporting - is a misunderstood IT trade. Again it is tidely connected with Optimization but also automation. For me reporting is only possible with the right monitoring tools. If you want to be able to do the right reporting you need to have a “big brother” in your environment. Getting the rigt reports from public and private is important, and with those reports the company can further finetune the environment.

There is so much more to say, but I leave it with this for now. I really look forward on the comments, and I know there is no “right” explanation for private, public, or hybrid cloud but I think we need to help our companies to understand the strenght of cloud. Help them sort out what kind to use and how. We’re here to help them use IT as IT is meant to be, regardless of the name we give it. See you next time, and in the comments!