Let's Get Real: 3 Cloud Scalability Myths Debunked UK Edition

SOLUTION BRIEF

Let’s Get Real: 3 Cloud Scalability Myths Debunked “ It’s undeniable that the most successful technology leaders of today and tomorrow are scaling in the cloud” – Jim Moran, General Partner North Bridge

“The Future of Cloud Computing,” a study from North Bridge, found that agility and scalability are among the primary factors fueling cloud adoption.1 These drivers are contributing to the cloud becoming entrenched as a core strategic solution in enterprise environments.

Scalability has long been heralded as a primary benefit of cloud services, and it’s fairly easy to see why.

It is easier to move resources around when you are leasing technology instead of buying it. Purchasing servers, storage systems and the network solutions needed to support them creates a high capital cost that makes committing to the configuration for an extended period critical. Adding to the setup can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars as you purchase new equipment and optimise it to work in the production environment.

Cloud computing lets the vendor take care of all of that work, allowing you to simply subscribe to what you need and not worry about the high capital costs - and corresponding commitment - of the investment. While this vision of a scalable cloud environment is real, there are plenty of myths out there when it comes to scaling cloud systems. Here are three of the most prominent myths and some insights into the reality surrounding the cloud situation.

1. You Can Expand the Cloud Without Limits In theory, the cloud is boundless this is especially true when dealing with the relative boundaries of cloud systems compared to the limitations of traditional enterprise IT configurations.

In reality, however, the cloud can only get as big as the vendor’s configuration can handle. Most cloud providers have fairly flexible data centre setups, but that doesn’t mean that they can expand to any size. They are still dealing with hardware, power, network and data centre floor space limitations.

There is a great deal of freedom to expand the resources within a cloud setup, but you may need to mix-and-match partnerships with different service providers to get seemingly unlimited scalability.

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SOLUTION BRIEF Let’s Get Real: 3 Cloud Scalability Myths Debunked (continued)

2. You Can Shrink the Setup Without a Fuss

3. You Can Scale the Cloud for Specific Projects

Expanding a cloud configuration can be easy, shrinking it is even simpler, right?

That’s the myth. The idea is that if you are paying a subscription for a certain quantity of resources, you should have no problem shifting to a model where you are paying less and getting less.This flexibility is possible, at least in theory, but there are plenty of potential roadblocks in the way, including:

This myth has some foundation in reality - the flexibility of the cloud does make it a natural fit in areas like app development where you need to set up a short-term testing configuration. Supporting specific project demands is a natural fit for cloud technologies, but the intricacies of managing vendor relationships create a layer of complexity that must be kept in mind. Legal and service level agreement limitations can stifle any ideas of quickly running out cloud setups for a project and shutting them down again in a hurry.

• What to do about the data that was in the cloud configuration and no longer has a home.

• How you will get users to adjust their operations around having fewer resources in the cloud.

In practice, it isn’t impossible to use the cloud as a tool to support innovative projects and ideas - the cloud is often far superior to traditional IT setups at this task.

However, you must be intentional about managing cloud partnerships and service level agreements to allow for this type of scalability if you want to establish a cloud setup flexible enough to adapt to different project requirements.

• What will happen if you need to scale back up again later?

The reality is that shrinking your cloud partnership with a vendor is heavily dependent on the service contract put in place at the outset of the partnership. Being able to shrink your cloud subscription on demand comes with plenty of caveats that must be taken into account.

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Finding Success in The Cloud Reality Many of the myths surrounding cloud scalability come because they describe technical attributes of the cloud.

The roadblocks to scaling the cloud often come from legal and service management challenges and less from the technical side of operations. Organisations that want to establish truly flexible cloud systems can benefit from strategic staff training and skills development around managing cloud partnerships.

Learning Tree offers a full cloud curriculum to ensure your staff has the breadth of skills needed to keep your business ahead.

Sources: http://www.northbridge.com/industrys-largest-cloud-survey-reveals-opportunity-do-more-cloud

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