Cloud computing still requires planning

Posted on April 11, 2012 by matt

Coming off my post about technology and the cool-aid of hype, an article about what the cloud doesn’t do resonated with my thinking. It reminded me of being a kid … “do you believe in magic” … we all want to believe, but when it comes to your computing, skilled analysis is still critical to your success. Seth Godin points out when execution gets cheaper, so should planning but counting on the cloud to do magic doesn’t count as planning.

Moreso, in his article, what Alexander says is that the cloud is here to stay. It is not going to altogether replace traditional computing methods, so now users will be faced with even more choices. With so much press on cloud products, often mixing or confusing SaaS, Iaas, PaaS services, confusion or poor choices are bound to result!

With new options being added daily, it is much more important to have trusted and skilled help to manage, evaluate, and deploy technology. Some thoughts come to mind:

  • Cloud may be your solution for all your hosting/compute needs, but do you have a backup plan?
  • Do you gain cost economies in using the cloud? (not everybody does!)
  • Is cost the main issue, or scale? Is long term or short term more important?
  • Have you really evaluated both fairly to get an accurate picture?

    • SRI is in some ways a traditional hosting company, owning hardware and running many enterprise sites. However in other ways we are a support and services team, using available tools to skillfully built a solution to best meet our customers needs. Several recent CloudFront CDN deployments we have done are a great example of this. We certainly could leased a few servers, put a web cache on them, and call it a CDN. But we know our customers could get better, indeed needed better for world-wide caching, and so we made recommendations based on their needs to use CloudFront. Next time their request may lead to another Amazon service, to a different 3rd party provider, or maybe to our data center space.

    If you are looking for planning, implementation, or help evaluating options don’t hesitate to call us!

    But for magic, see this:

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