Why you should consider cloud

Okay. You open this post, I have your attention for perhaps 1 minute tops, and I hope your are not scrolling down doing some fast pace reading.

I’ll not tell you that migrating to cloud you will save budget compared with on-premises architectures, because sometimes this is not true. I’ll not say to you that 4 cents per gig is a great value, because when you multiply this by a million or a trillion (petabytes) you will have a problem in your hand.

What I will tell is why, seriously, you need to think about cloud today. Dont leave it for tomorrow. Spent 3 minutes here with me, today. Lets go?

Wanna know what is truly great and awesome in cloud computing? Okay. In five years (or maybe next week), you a senior IT professional is talking with your child, who works in the IT field too, remembering the “golden age”, the “good old days”, the “old school”. Here is what you guys will talk about:

-- Hey son, when I have your age, someday my manager enters my cubicle yelling at me (because someone yell at him/her) “We need to make this servers available today!!We already have the code, some beautiful and colorful app that will engage 5 times more customers to us, and we need to deploy the infrastructure today”. What I think? If everything is already bought, this means a lost night/dawn/morning, 2 maybe 5 grams of caffeine, high levels of cortisol and my job will be:

unbox everything and mess with the datacenter
physically install servers, firewalls, network load balancing, cabling, and make then receive an AC power for the very first time
if anything explodes, all lights are green and everything is 5 by 5, time to install and configure everything, OS, firewall rules, storage, networking, latest patches and testing testing, testing.
if everything is good, I should now have 2 maybe 3 servers, available to receive the code. Is 11AM, my boss is yelling at me again (not his/her fault, its a critical moment), but, after 12 hours, I am a hero and our new and colorful application is running flawlessly.

-- What??? 10 hours dad? And you weren’t fired?

-- No son, I was a hero. How would you do all of this today?

-- 5 clicks, 15 minutes work, being pessimist.

In 2006 when AWS launch EC2 the game starts to change my friends. IT and Business start to make amends, walking hand to hand with each other. IT is not “that bad place, with really mean people that everyday says NO to me”..now the IT are the good guys..the “do” guys. Why? Because you dont need to spend 10 hours anymore. with 10 clicks, and minutes you’ll have the job done. Its amazing right?

Okay. Some of you know are thinking “but I have a virtualized environment”, I run a hypervisor. I have templates and automation to do this work in minutes too.

Well, what about your farm’s capacity? Do you have enough cores, ram and disk to deploy something that become a reality today? You need to make annual capacity planning, buying and making all this capacity available for someday, perhaps, consume it?

If you are not able to expand your farm today, but your competitor can, how it can affect your business goals? In a world of today, now, this second, you can really wait hours/days/weeks to get your infrastructure ready?

Virtualization is great. Virtualization change the game in the past. But on-premises virtualization dont have a *very* important thing. Hyperscale. You need a thousand cores today? Okay. You need 2TB of memory today? Okay. You need 800TB of disk today because someone thought that deploy a giant hadoop cluster today is a good idea? Okay.

Cloud providers are buying, in a scale of millions, brand new servers, disks, cpus, researching and developing new PaaS and SaaS offers. Everything to make your IT department a business best friend.

Cloud is not just about savings. Cloud is about overcome competition. Cloud is not a place were everyone is happy and you should be happy there too. Cloud is a tool. And you should consider use this tool. Today.

See you!