I decided to write a post about how to save money in cloud computing. The post started to be very long and I change my mind to split it in a serie of posts on this theme. I’ll guide you through some concepts definitions about computing and cloud until we reach out the root cause of costs in cloud computing: software engineering.
So in case you are a generation Z member, probably you don’t know anything about on premise computing, routing tables, buy a new server and so on… You have born in the cloud days, you have never compiled a Linux kernel in your life, you truly believe that your macbook runs everything in some magic way, just needing to access the right website.
For me, a member of the Millennium generation, the things are completely different. I have seen all the migration from buy a new server, install the Linux o.s, configure all the things and share resources through the intranet network.
The first main difference between the old way for the cloud model is that: before the cloud age you planned which resources you needed, presented the budget to the I.T manager and got the approval to buy a brand new server. After four months you realized that you need one more server, because the number of user increased. In a very perfect path, you needed to ask for a new server for your manager, he approve on the same day and a month before you got the sever, spent two days configuring all the thing and voilà…
Considering that, you needed to request for resources very carefully, because in case you need some more, the time the between the request for a resource and its productization could be very long.
Nowadays the things are very different, in a mouse’s click you can increase your infrastructure in some minutes or even seconds. Now we have a powerful mechanism to literally send our budget through the infinity and beyond.
In many situations we have this two faces of the same coin: on the one hand the ability to downtime the productization resource, on other hand the ability to guide to ruin the project budget.
Using another analogy:
In the cloud approach we have control over the tap, but not over the water meter.
The issue remains:
How to take control of the cloud costs? And most important of all, how to save money in cloud deployed resources?
Should everything move to cloud?
The promise of cloud was: Cloud is cheaper than have your own infrastructure on your own physic space. After almost two decades of cloud, it is not so easy like that, it depends on a bunch of factors which we must consider.
Imagining a very specific scenario: We have a 150-200 employees company which everyone has access to our internal HR web platform using a SQL database. In this not so hypothetical scenario, try to answer:
is better to move to cloud or keep that in your own server?
AGAIN, it is not a straight answer, we must to consider a bunch of factors, which we’ll not approach at this post. We’re going to focus on the engineering side, because software engineering is one of the key features for save money in cloud or even outside its.
Next post we’re going enter in details about how to save money in cloud being a software engineer.