This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Going Off-brand
Most people who look at cloud computing focus on the top three or four brands. After all, those are the cloud brands that most enterprises leverage, and those brands spent billions on their cloud services over the last few years to stay cutting edge and competitive. However, the big brands are not always the most optimal.
Today we can leverage reliable cloud services from any number of providers, including storage and compute services. Depending on the needs of your project, a nonmainstream brand could end up saving millions of dollars in cloud service costs over the next several years.
There also are non-cloud or less-than cloud options, such as managed services providers (MSPs). MSPs manage the services, including cloud services, for you, including major or minor brand cloud services, traditional system services, network services, or anything else that others can maintain on your behalf. Covered later, the opportunity with MSPs is to replace some cloud services with services that MSPs run while they also take care of systems that run across traditional platforms and/or any cloud platforms. Many MSPs offer built-in optimization systems, which means that they are not only managing traditional services and public cloud services on your behalf but also are able to optimize the use of these resources for you, thus reducing overall costs.
Finally, there are the opportunities and challenges around multicloud. Multicloud means you leverage heterogeneous public cloud services that allow you to deal with other services as the same. With multicloud, you can leverage many brands of storage and compute services using the best-of-breed services as well as least-cost services rather than deal with just a single cloud provider.
Leveraging Second-Tier Cloud Providers
Now that the concept of IaaS cloud computing is more than a decade old, we are beginning to see second-tier cloud providers enter the market. Of course, they only offer a fraction of the services you’ll find within a major cloud provider, and they don’t have as many points of presence (where the data centers are located), but a second-tier provider can offer a cost savings that makes them too compelling to ignore.
So, how much savings? Considering just compute, second-tier providers can offer the same compute configurations at prices 25–50 percent lower than those of the larger players, and you leverage the configurations in much the same manner. On one hand, they are not the premium brand, and thus you’ll get some questions from those who consider the cloud brand inferior. But, if you save $10 million a year and your production workloads do not suffer, it may be worth the risk. Make sure to include testing, fully understand how you’ll be billed, and do other due diligence, and the chances of success go way up.
Also, keep in mind that we now live in a cloud computing world where multicloud is now the norm. It’s considered acceptable to leverage two or three major cloud brands. Add in the ability to place discount brands into your cloud services catalog to have them available for use, and this could be where the second-tier concept takes off. In this case, it’s just as easy to attach a lower-cost resource such as storage and compute as it is to attach a major brand resource. Ease of implementation will push many enterprises to leverage the lower-cost resource, and perhaps send more savings to the bottom line. Also, by design, these lower-cost resources can work and play well with major brand cloud resources. Much of what is happening in the cloud world now and over the next several years will be a race to the bottom of the market.
Leveraging MSPs
MSPs differ a great deal in the services that each provides, but most will manage public cloud services for you, including provisioning, securing, and maintaining these cloud services in support of your workloads and data. They also support traditional systems, such as mainframes and traditional x85 such as LAMP-based platforms. In many instances, MSPs can be talked into managing more specialized systems such as edge computing systems and high-performance computing. MSPs often provide cloud-like services such as storage and compute that are less costly than the same services you might find within public cloud providers.
The advantage of using MSPs over traditional clouds is both cost and the ability to host several different platforms, including mainstream public clouds, and have the MSP manage those platforms. This means you have a service running in front of your cloud service that removes you from much of the work and complexity of managing all those systems on your own. For many enterprises, working with an MSP is often a lower-cost choice when compared to the costs to manage all their compute and storage services. With hundreds of MSPs in the market today, this option will continue to grow in scope.
Multicloud by Necessity
We’ll address the important topic of multicloud later in the book, so we won’t get too deep into it here. However, when discussing the ability to leverage different cloud brands and cloud types to save costs, remember that multicloud is a core weapon to leverage to both reduce costs and focus on the use of best-of-breed cloud resources.
Multicloud by necessity means that we consider multicloud a tool to leverage different services to provide a choice that should lead to utilizing services that are more cost effective. Multicloud provides the ability to pick the exact right services your applications and systems need, or best-of-breed, as well as pick the services that are at a lower cost point. To achieve your optimization objectives, multicloud is usually a necessity.