A popular mis-quote from Field of Dreams, but in the world of cloud-computing, it often is the case that if you build it, they will come.
Build What?
That’s the beauty of cloud – it doesn’t matter! As a cloud architect, I don’t mind whether you’re selling widgets or holographic 3D automatic, systematic hiiiiiiiidromatic… wait, what was my train of thought? Ah yes, it doesn’t matter what your business does, or what you would like your business to do – with cloud technologies you can give it a go.
The olden-days
Let’s say you started Instagram before the cloud, what would you need?
- Lots of servers all over the world
- Huge internet connections to feed them all
- Lots of storage space for all the photographs
But that’s just for starters! How about the security of your data? What about upgrading that internet link when you eat up everything the datacentre currently has available? What about assuring the shareholders that you’re in complete control of your machines running in all these datacentres all over the world, and your corporate govournance covers them all?
And how long would all this take? Let’s imagine your new app becomes really popular in India. Your market research didn’t catch that, and now you have thousands of users in India with a bad user experience of your app because it’s slow, because they you don’t have a datacentre nearby. How many months will it take you to put that right and deploy more servers there?
Cloud Architecture
With a cloud first aproach, you might not even have servers in the usual sense. If you need storage, we don’t necessarily need a server to host that storage, we just use a cloud service instead. The beauty of that is we never need to worry about that piece of the architecture ever again! It will grow and shrink with demand (known as scaling up and scaling out – check out our Buzzword Bingo blog post if you want to learn more about cloud terminology).
If you do also need servers in the usual sense, you can have as many as you’d like, as quickly as you’d like them, and wherever in the world you think they would best serve your customers. Have your technical team build one server, and after it has been tested, just copy it as many times as you need to.
Maintenance?
It’s starnge for a heading to be a question, I know, but in this case it is relevant. Do you need maintenance in the traditional sense when your whole platform has been designed and developed to run in the cloud? Well, probably, but much less of it!
Database Administration
Cloud databases (like AWS Relational Database Services) don’t trouble you with minor database engine version upgrades and the like unless you really want them to do so. They storage and capacity can scale and grow automatically in line with your business. All of a sudden your team don’t need to spend hours fettling tablespaces and the like. Now they can get on with what they enjoy, and what makes your business money!
Serverless
We haven’t even spoken about the really cool part of modern cloud platforms; the ones which don’t have any servers at all! Your developers only care about producing great code which fits the brief, and which works in as elegant a way as possible. So what if they could write that code, and just push it straight into an environment, without having to worry about where it runs, or how it scales? With serverless architectures, that’s exactly what happens! Watch out for an upcoming blog post about serverless and how it could change your business.
As Big as the Big Boys
And the beauty of all of this is that these are all the tools which huge multinational corporations get to play with too – only you just pay for the tiny slice you need. Think of it like getting on the train; you don’t need a whole train to yourself, so you just pay for the seat you’re using, but you still get the benefit of the speed, the comfort and everything else which comes with that service.
If all this hasn’t got your attention, and shown you that deploying your business workloads into the cloud can give you real benefits in terms of performance, and also cost, we’re not sure what will.
All this leads us to the idea we started with – if you build it in the cloud – they will come. A popular mis-quote from Field of Dreams, but in the world of cloud-computing, it often is the case that if you build it, they will come.
Build What?
That’s the beauty of cloud – it doesn’t matter! As a cloud architect, I don’t mind whether you’re selling widgets or holographic 3D automatic, systematic hiiiiiiiidromatic… wait, what was my train of thought? Ah yes, it doesn’t matter what your business does, or what you would like your business to do – with cloud technologies you can give it a go.
The olden-days
Let’s say you started Instagram before the cloud, what would you need?
- Lots of servers all over the world
- Huge internet connections to feed them all
- Lots of storage space for all the photographs
But that’s just for starters! How about the security of your data? What about upgrading that internet link when you eat up everything the datacentre currently has available? What about assuring the shareholders that you’re in complete control of your machines running in all these datacentres all over the world, and your corporate govournance covers them all?
And how long would all this take? Let’s imagine your new app becomes really popular in India. Your market research didn’t catch that, and now you have thousands of users in India with a bad user experience of your app because it’s slow, because they you don’t have a datacentre nearby. How many months will it take you to put that right and deploy more servers there?
Cloud Architecture
With a cloud first aproach, you might not even have servers in the usual sense. If you need storage, we don’t necessarily need a server to host that storage, we just use a cloud service instead. The beauty of that is we never need to worry about that piece of the architecture ever again! It will grow and shrink with demand (known as scaling up and scaling out – check out our Buzzword Bingo blog post if you want to learn more about cloud terminology).
If you do also need servers in the usual sense, you can have as many as you’d like, as quickly as you’d like them, and wherever in the world you think they would best serve your customers. Have your technical team build one server, and after it has been tested, just copy it as many times as you need to.
Maintenance?
It’s starnge for a heading to be a question, I know, but in this case it is relevant. Do you need maintenance in the traditional sense when your whole platform has been designed and developed to run in the cloud? Well, probably, but much less of it!
Database Administration
Cloud databases (like AWS Relational Database Services) don’t trouble you with minor database engine version upgrades and the like unless you really want them to do so. They storage and capacity can scale and grow automatically in line with your business. All of a sudden your team don’t need to spend hours fettling tablespaces and the like. Now they can get on with what they enjoy, and what makes your business money!
Serverless
We haven’t even spoken about the really cool part of modern cloud platforms; the ones which don’t have any servers at all! Your developers only care about producing great code which fits the brief, and which works in as elegant a way as possible. So what if they could write that code, and just push it straight into an environment, without having to worry about where it runs, or how it scales? With serverless architectures, that’s exactly what happens! Watch out for an upcoming blog post about serverless and how it could change your business.
As Big as the Big Boys
And the beauty of all of this is that these are all the tools which huge multinational corporations get to play with too – only you just pay for the tiny slice you need. Think of it like getting on the train; you don’t need a whole train to yourself, so you just pay for the seat you’re using, but you still get the benefit of the speed, the comfort and everything else which comes with that service.
If all this hasn’t got your attention, and shown you that deploying your business workloads into the cloud can give you real benefits in terms of performance, and also cost, we’re not sure what will.
All this leads us to the idea we started with – if you build it in the cloud – they will come
