When it comes to determining the difference between cloud solutions and services, there are some key variations that make it quite simple to delineate between the Public Cloud and Private Cloud.
The Public Cloud is peerless for some applications, particularly public-facing business to consumer (B2C) applications that require scale and ubiquity. It rarely matters where that data resides or whether performance is less than stellar. These requirements rarely apply to B2B applications, so it is important for a business to look at hosting its own private cloud or outsource to a reliable local commercial private cloud provider for specific applications.
Development and test clouds can be automated to spin down when not in use, but production environments typically need to be always online. Public Cloud companies bill by the hour, so it is important to consider how often a computing environment will be running and what type of files will reside in the cloud.
Standard, small virtual machines initially make the cost of public cloud usage appear low. Test VMs are very cost-effective, but, when an application requires larger and more complex instances that may use GPU (graphics processing) and high-density CPU (central processing), costs quickly grow significantly.
Databases are the other most common element of a cloud purchase. These are often delivered ‘as a service’ and costs can vary wildly based on type, power, and storage. Additional supporting services, such as network load balancers, security appliances and advanced monitoring are realistically essential, but also incur additional charges, which skews the actual cost versus what was budgeted.
The largest and least predictable cloud cost tends to be for network bandwidth. For a website hosted in the public cloud, the more popular it is in terms of visitors, and the larger the files in transition, the more data must travel in and out of the cloud, all of which is an additional cost, which equates to a far higher bill and a consequently very unpleasant surprise for the CFO.
Companies of all sizes are transforming the way they work by turning to cloud computing for IT needs. The benefits are obvious and immediate.
· No need for vast recurring capital expenditure on server hardware
· No expense for the power to run the servers and cool the data closet.
· Data is stored remotely in a secure building with 100% uptime for power and network.
· Staff can work on programs from anywhere and seamlessly collaborate on shared files.
· Great flexibility for businesses that are growing fast or have seasonal demand for resources.
AWS and other massive cloud providers are growing fastest as they attract global corporations. Huge corporations have large IT departments with their own in-house expertise to deploy cloud services.
Smaller businesses, on the other hand don’t typically have the expertise to help them find their way around the services and will almost certainly require support, which adds to the cost.
Mega-cloud providers have become the default choice because of the perception of the greater ease of migrating to a large vendor.
When IT leaders come to migrate applications across, they find a lack of adequate support, where with a smaller service provider they can pick up the phone and talk to an engineer. Additionally, mega-providers’ prices are low for a base level of service and costs can escalate quickly depending on network needs and application file sizes.
