I've been reading lots of online articles recently and yes, everyone is well and truly in the clouds. Seeing lots of interesting marketing as well, one that specifically caught my mind is vendors touting that they have a multi-tenanted architecture and that other hosted solutions are ASP model and then going in depth into this. I thought to myself - from a business perspective "who cares"?
If I am a customer paying for a SaaS/Hosted solution, then I dont really care about the details of the implementation do I? What I'm more concerned about is the reliability, credibility and impact that the service is going to have on my business (hopefully positive). When trying to explain the differences to a non-technical person, it is almost the same as trying to explain the differences between object oriented programming and procedural programming - a great discussion but again to a non-techie - who cares?
Like all approaches, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but we should always remember what the business is asking for and ultimately paying for.
Comments (3)
Jan 24, 2009
Matt Lynch says:
I think one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is the ability to reduce...I think one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is the ability to reduce the capital expenditure spent on server infrastructure and software. The money which would normally be allocated to buying and operating a data center can then be re-routed to things like marketing, customer service or R&D. For a company that chooses a cloud computing model, this could allow them to focus more on their core business. Companies which provide infrastructure for cloud computing such as Go-Grid, AppNexus or FlexiScale, allow you to rent server space by the hour and generally in arrears.
For instance, a start-up company might plan a web campaign which ties in with a television show that is shown on a Monday night (or a once off event). With this media exposure, the volume of traffic might be 10x greater on Mondays than any other day of the week. Ie, You need 10x as many servers on that day than any other day in the week. If you buy a data center or use regular hosting, you will need enough servers to cope with the capacity required for Monday, but the servers will be mostly idle for the other 6 days of the week which would be a waste of money. By using a cloud computing based model, the company could scale up on Monday morning and scale down on tuesday. If it were a one off campaign, you would not be locked into a 12 month contract for the servers.
Jan 24, 2009
Robert Castaneda says:
Hi Matt, Thanks for the comment. The above points you note are common cloud arg...Hi Matt,
Thanks for the comment. The above points you note are common cloud arguments, but they are not impossible to produce in a hosted model, the assumption many make is that doing things in the cloud MUST always be cheaper.
Working on many J2EE systems where we architected so that extra app servers could be added as needed, the only clients that needed it were the ones that could indeed afford to rent a few new machines for a couple of weeks. Note - we could rent them short term, not for 12 months. Great hosting companies like Contegix, and YourASP have been very flexible with our requests in the past.
I don't doubt the benefits that the cloud architecture can bring, the whole hype though seems to be a bit over the top. The marketing should probably be directed to the hosting companies rather to the end user. I am also unclear as a business user what a multi-tenanted approach really does for them. "OK, so my data and system is shared?"... "so if one crashes, do they all crash?", or "if one chews up all the bandwidth, what happens to the others?", or "ok, so the person providing the cloud service isn't running a profitable business, I have 2 choices - 1 move off (which I can't because it may be proprietary), or 2 - my fees are going up)".
I liken multi-tenanted to shared housing, or apartment living. I much prefer a house and if I could have my own solar power rather than rely on the grid I'd take it
It would be interesting to look at the fees of many Saas/Multi-tenanted providers and see the amount their fees have dropped over time as their respective subscribers have increased over time.
Feb 22, 2009
ellen@clifftop.us says:
To get back to your original question: "Like all approaches, each has its stre...To get back to your original question:
"Like all approaches, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but we should always remember what the business is asking for and ultimately paying for."
If I were the customer - performance, scale, cheaper hardware, yeah - all those - but at the end of the day, as a user/customer, the MOST important thing is knowing that my data is safe and secure.
High availability and/or preparedness for outages - not the first thing that has been discussed in Cloud talks, but needs to not be lost.
Here's a good blog on architecture to deal with high availability. Bad news - surely to add cost to service.
Here's a good blog (and comments) on the disaster (dark clouds) if not planned for. Good news/bad news - extra cost is better than lost data.
Backups are pretty standard fair options in hosted services, as they should be.
If a cloud provider does not have a solution for data backup, this would be concerning to me as a customer.