When Are Public Cloud Services the Best Solution?
I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer for this. I know some companies want to
move their entire infrastructure to public cloud services and get out of the
infrastructure business completely. Other companies want to use the public cloud for
disaster-recovery purposes. Others want to use it for test/dev scenarios. Still others
want to use it for specific projects. And some don’t want to get anywhere near it!
Each company has specific drivers and factors that guide their public cloud strategy,
and once again, they could be based on technical considerations. They can also be
based on personal preference, which may not be grounded in fact but is still a real
factor in the decision-making process to leverage the public cloud.
At this point, I want to take a step back and talk about a key advantage of the public
cloud over on-premises solutions: You pay for what you use. The public cloud operates
on consumption-based pricing. Various units are used for pricing with Microsoft
Azure, such as computer minutes (a change from the per hour billing Azure used to
use), which vary in price depending on the size of the virtual machine that is running
and various other configurations. The key point is that if I run 10 four-vCPU virtual
machines in Microsoft Azure for 4 hours a month, I pay for only those 4 hours instead
of having the cost of running servers all month, which would be the case if they were
run on premises.
You also pay for storage, for SQL Server storage, and for bandwidth used out of the
Microsoft Azure datacenters. Notice that you don’t pay for inbound (ingress) traffic
into Microsoft Azure. On the compute side, you are paying for the time that the virtual
machine is deployed. Whether the VM is idle or running at full capacity, you pay the
same (unless you completely deprovision it, which I cover in more detail later). That is
why it’s important that you don’t create instances and forget to deprovision them.
Many organizations may have certain tasks that run perhaps only once a month but
require huge amounts of compute or storage when they run. It is a waste to have all
that computer and storage fabric idle for most of the month. This would be a great
type of application to run on Microsoft Azure, because you would deploy only the
application and scale to many instances during those critical few days each month.
Other types of businesses may get really busy on a particular day of the year, and only
on that day require thousands of instances of their website VMs and application VMs,
while the rest of the year they may need only a hundredth of those instances or
perhaps run on premises during that time. The sidebar “Super Bowl Sunday and the
American Love of Pizza” takes a look at a great use of Microsoft Azure.
SUPER BOWL SUNDAY AND THE AMERICAN LOVE OF PIZZA
I’ll be up front; I’m English, and I don’t understand the American football game.
I’ve tried to watch it a couple of times. I even watched the 2006 Super Bowl—it