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Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You have dozens or hundreds of apps running in your organization, and now that you’ve seen the operational efficiencies and agility available to you in the cloud, you’re tempted to move as many of them to the cloud as quickly as possible. As you’ll see in the examples below, cloud computing is indeed a good fit for many common workloads.
I firmly believe that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is for every organization, but not for every application. The reality is that some applications just aren’t a good fit for the ephemeral and dynamic environment of the cloud. Still others have very specific environmental requirements that make them ill suited. Read on as I explore more about what you should consider before earmarking a workload for the cloud.
Unpredictable load or potential for explosive growth: Whenever your app is public facing, it has the potential to be wildly popular. Social games, eCommerce sites, blogs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products fall into this category. If you release the next Farmville™ and your traffic spikes, you can scale up and down in the cloud according to demand, avoiding a “success disaster” and never over-provisioning your infrastructure.
Partial utilization: When traffic fluctuates – say with daily cycles of playing or shopping, or with occasional, compute-intensive batch processing – you can spin up extra servers in the cloud during the peaks and spin them down afterwards.
Easy parallelization: Applications like media streaming can be scaled horizontally and are generally a good use case for the cloud, because they scale out rather than up.
Finally, keep in mind the ideal of cloud computing as a way of using multiple resource pools – public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, your internal data center – not choosing one over the others. RightScale lets you see and manage all of them through one interface with a single set of tools and best practices.
Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You have dozens or hundreds of apps running in your organization, and now that you’ve seen the operational efficiencies and agility available to you in the cloud, you’re tempted to move as many of them to the cloud as quickly as possible. As you’ll see in the examples below, cloud computing is indeed a good fit for many common workloads.
I firmly believe that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is for every organization, but not for every application. The reality is that some applications just aren’t a good fit for the ephemeral and dynamic environment of the cloud. Still others have very specific environmental requirements that make them ill suited. Read on as I explore more about what you should consider before earmarking a workload for the cloud.
3 Quick Criteria for a Good Fit
While each application is unique, and it’s important to apply your own lens when evaluating your cloud strategy, there are some rules of thumb that should help identify applications that are winning choices for cloud:Unpredictable load or potential for explosive growth: Whenever your app is public facing, it has the potential to be wildly popular. Social games, eCommerce sites, blogs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products fall into this category. If you release the next Farmville™ and your traffic spikes, you can scale up and down in the cloud according to demand, avoiding a “success disaster” and never over-provisioning your infrastructure.
Partial utilization: When traffic fluctuates – say with daily cycles of playing or shopping, or with occasional, compute-intensive batch processing – you can spin up extra servers in the cloud during the peaks and spin them down afterwards.
Easy parallelization: Applications like media streaming can be scaled horizontally and are generally a good use case for the cloud, because they scale out rather than up.
Finally, keep in mind the ideal of cloud computing as a way of using multiple resource pools – public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, your internal data center – not choosing one over the others. RightScale lets you see and manage all of them through one interface with a single set of tools and best practices.
