Baseline magazine publishes a synthetic business use case
Baseline:
Cloud Computing: Clearing Away Infrastructure Muck
By Chuck Phillips
2009-10-28 How cloud computing can help IT managers overcome infrastructure hurdles like cost and hardware provisioning.
Marketing
has approached you with an interesting idea for an interactive gaming
application that could go viral in a big way and draw hundreds of
thousands of visitors—millions even—to your Website. The research for
the game, dubbed Project X, is done, the numbers look good and everyone
is excited about its potential.
Now it’s time to think about the costs, specifically the infrastructure required to launch such a campaign.
Traditionally, your best and only option has been to buy or lease
the various components of the infrastructure and contract with one or
more content delivery networks (CDNs) for added performance and
scalability. This approach comes with its fair share of problems.
The first is cost. Maintaining infrastructure is a pricey, ongoing
expenditure. The second is hardware provisioning, which most IT
professionals know is a tricky game because it forces you to walk a
fine line between wasted resources and potential downtime in the event
of massive traffic spikes.
Another new, increasingly viable option is cloud computing, which
allows you to convert infrastructure from a capital expenditure into a
relatively inexpensive operating expenditure by outsourcing the
“undifferentiated muck,” what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos terms the
infrastructure life cycle, to a so-called cloud provider. By
outsourcing to a cloud solution, you eliminate the need to manage most,
if not all, of the muck, thereby mitigating your operating
expenditures. [Read the rest]
The article goes through various manifestations, according to the author, of the cloud computing from Software as a Service to Infrastructure as a Service. The article implicitly suggest that cloud computing is a way to outsource your operational pain points and instead focus on creating business value. This sounds really good, but the devil is in the details. Here is a cloud computing horror story from the trenches.
Know it All:
by Tony Kontzer
You'll have to excuse Jerry Batt if he's a bit grouchy these days.
Amid all the talk of cloud computing and its ability to deliver lower
costs and unprecedented flexibility, and to free IT staff to focus on
bottom-line impact, Batt, the CIO of Pulte Homes, has had enough.
Well over a year ago, Batt told me that his confidence in the cloud
had been destroyed. He'd made an aggressive leap by deploying a large
IT vendor's on-demand CRM application, imagining all the benefits he'd
been told about, both by the vendor and his peers at other companies.
He and his staff spent weeks ironing out all the integrations between
the CRM application and several other IT systems, a process that
proceeded smoothly. But when it came time to make changes to the CRM
configuration, all the other applications went down, forcing Batt to
uncouple everything and rethink things. It was easy to understand his
frustration.
Well, I got to talk to Batt again this week, thinking that by now
he'd have had his concerns assuaged by the vendor, and would at least
be evaluating a renewed foray into the cloud. I couldn't have been more
wrong. As it turns out, Batt is even more suspicious of the cloud
today, and it's that same vendor that's shaken his confidence.
What, you ask, could possibly have been worse than his initial
experience? Try this on for size: He'd originally signed a long-term
agreement with the vendor, committing to pay for the service into 2011
and had paid for some period of time up-front. When the second
installment was coming due, he reasonably asked to have it deferred
since Pulte hadn't been using any of the capacity it had paid for
anyway.
The vendor not only refused to defer the payments, it told him that
if he didn't pay, it would shut down access to the service altogether.
All of which has led Batt to question the messaging cloud providers
have been putting into the market about being able to dial back a
service when capacity's not needed. It especially irked him that the
vendor seemed unsympathetic about the beating Pulte and other
homebuilders have taken in this rotten economy. The episode has led
Batt to conclude that the big vendors--or at least, the unnamed one in
question--have decided that giving up the software licensing cash cow
is too much to face, and that they have to extract their profits
somewhere.
Make no mistake--the main thing preventing cloud computing from
taking off among the Fortune 500 is that the offerings thus far from
big IT suppliers are not thought to be up to snuff. And Batt suggests
that IT industry consolidation has resulted in the vendors on that
short list having way too much power when it comes to pricing. [Read more]
In this case the CIO is aggrieved by a cloud computing vendor who refused to defer charges for unused capacity.
So, who is right at the end? One thing to remember is that no technical means by itself would solve a business problem. The key is in setting the business goal that should start with the user and anticipated usage in mind. Unless there is a model of projected user experience, there is no way to accurately estimate operational costs, nor compare different solutions. Start with the user -- your biggest asset, build the usage model, tie user experience to desirable business outcomes, and then evaluate different technical solutions for the purpose of systems optimization. This will allow you to control the cost and to scale when it is necessary.
posted by: Greg Margolin
Greg Margolin is a Managing Partner at Global Quality Partners, LLC
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