Comments on: Reducing costs is not the only benefit of cloud computing & SaaS

By: Private clouds are (not) the future – PEG

Private clouds are (not) the future – PEG — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:45:36 +0000

[...] I’ve pointed out before, there’s a lot more to cloud than simply reducing costs. The biggest benefit is probably the agility that cloud can bring to your IT estate, leveraging a [...]

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:16:26 +0000

I've been thinking for a little while that we should stop saying “time = money” and start thinking “money = time”. (Let's assume that this operation is not commutative.

Your on the mark with the residue, which is are really the messy details of making cloud work. I don't see any of this as insurmountable (assuming that we're happy with a “good enough” solution).

By: coetsee

coetsee — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:05:22 +0000

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By: Chris Swan

Chris Swan — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:52:29 +0000

So it's about time (whether we're talking about latency or duration). Maybe this finally proves that time!=money?

It's not just infrastructure that we don't have to worry about. If you can position yourself to be a big SaaS user then you can stop worrying about an awful lot of things. There is however some residue:

* Identity management remains a huge issue, though I have high hopes that serious progress will be made in 2010. There's a lot of good stuff that can be back ported from enterprise identity management, and not too many places that need to be touched to push past 80:20 coverage.
* Data portability, and particularly the 'what do I do when my provider goes bust' (or I fall out with them) remains an issue. This problem was never really fixed in the enterprise, and so remains somewhat intractable except for trivial cases like email.
* Security remains a double edged sword. Most service providers are doing security better than the users of their services could ever do it themselves (with the possible exception of large enterprises with well resourced security teams), but each service provider also represents a pool of risk aggregation.

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:36:02 +0000

I'm not sure it's all “I want it now” as “it's not worth my time to worry about”. We're all time poor, and cloud is a nice tool to create time to worry about something other than infrastructure, even if it's only a private cloud. As you point out, cloud is a nice tool for bottling up the expertise require to run a virtualised environment.

As with all good arguments, there's nothing original in what I wrote; it's all just common sense. Unfortunately common sense is not all that common

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:51:01 +0000

It seems that the cloud bandwagon wants to push the cost angle in exclusion to everything else, as you point out. I even read an article on TechCrunch the other day, written by the CEO of cloud vendor, arguing that we've crossed the chasm and are in the tornado (there was a lot of metaphors in the article) and cost efficient cloud will take over the world.

It not that the ideas in our posts are new or original, but they do seem to be overlooked by a lot of pundets.

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:31:18 +0000

Nice! None of this is rocket science, but it does require us to change the way we think about IT.

By: rjshuttleworth

rjshuttleworth — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:22:00 +0000

Completely agree. Having spent the last 6 months pulling the plug on our datacenter and migrating to EC2 the benefits of cost are far outweighed by all the flexibility you get. Like for like, we cut costs by about 40%. That was mostly the reduced system administration burden we needed to carry (new breed of sys guys that are far more dev like) and no longer carrying heavy power and carrier charges. But why go like for like? We span up more environments, became more fault tolerant, could run more dev environments and try out new things. Before long we quickly realised that we had lumps of hardware kicking around that were worth not a lot, but that could more than happily run eucalyptus. Why should we pay amazon to run our images? We ran private cloud as well as public. For pretty much the same cost we got double the infrastructure across zones plus a shed load of dev environments. Our releases started happening fast and fluid and my dev resources started to want to release as it meant they weren't wrapped up in the red tape of the datacentre.

By: Chris Swan

Chris Swan — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:04:12 +0000

This is a well worn argument, and I think anybody on the inside looking out already knows that it's all about 'I want it now' rather than $s. The only significant consideration on the cost side is that cloud computing and SaaS present a ramp function rather than a series of steps; and you can go off and have a lot of fun figuring out when the ramp is above or below the steps for various use uses and user populations.

A view on this that I took a little while ago is that 'cloud' is really all about management. The companies that are attracting attention right now (like Amazon, Google and SF.com) have achieved tremendous economies of scale (and scope) over a bunch of assets that they own by having better management platforms than the typical enterprise. An inversion is coming though, and people are bottling that management goodness into things that can be used at much smaller scale - right the way down to the individual device/user (something that I wrote about last month at http://wp.me/palij-3a). Something like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (which bottles the Eucalyptus flavour of AWS style management) lets you deploy AMIs onto your own machines.

By: Lee Provoost

Lee Provoost — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:25:03 +0000

Reminds me of a post I've written last year "Don't focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility" http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2009/0...