Cloud as a cost center
When building solution in the cloud. You might be found that the cloud is a cost center. You can compare that the cloud computing cost you more than the traditional hosting. Therefore, you need to take care the 'go' or 'not go' in the cloud situation. You can answer these five questions.
- Is my current hosting environment having a bottleneck in term capacity and performance?
- Is my current solution needs a burst performance when needed or all the time?
- Is my current solution depending on the on-premise infrastructure?
- Does my current solution just need to run in seldom occasion?
- Is my current solution should fulfill the compliance from the specific institution?
If one of your answer is yes! That you might need cloud. If you do not find a yes answer, please stay on your current solution. However, cloud is costly, and you need take it seriously when designing a solution in the cloud. Because when you are doing improper design you will get inefficiency greater than the conventional hosting. This article will discuss five domain that you need to do when designing cloud computing solution.
Five principles when designing the cloud solution
Tips 1. Scalable, Resilient, and Manageable
This is the first thing you need to consider.
- Your solution should be scalable by using the power of the cloud. The solution should be elastic so when there is no user you should slow down the computing power
- Resilient when your solution is needed most, the solution should fulfill the need
- Manageable the solution should be controlled by the organization with self-management model.
You can read these principles in here
Tips 2. Understand and Choosing the correct services
When building the cloud solution, you have a lot options to do the same things. For example, when you host a web application in Amazon Web Services you can host in LightSail, S3, EC2, or Beanstalks. You need to understand the topology of the product. You can visit Azure Architecture Center to understand the topology product
Tips 3. Designing with Cost Optimization
Whether you are doing in AWS or Azure, the cost optimization is a must have design. In order to deliver a cost-efficient solution, you should understand
- Cost model
- Cost monitoring
- Budgeting
You can see a good checklist here
Tips 4. Designing with "Eliminate Waste"
When you are designing high performance solution in the cloud, please keep in mind that the cloud will have a lot of waste in the cost when you do not need it. To eliminate waste, please make sure that the high-performance solution is 'just enough' rather than overkill. Follow these three easy steps.
- Choosing the correct compute solution. For example, VM vs Cloud App.
- Starting with a free / shared tier to eliminate waste. In VM, you can start from the small instance.
- Choosing the right storage. HDD vs SSD, Tables vs Blob, etc.
You can start the eliminate waste by understanding the fundamental of product here
Tips 5. Activating Runbooks or Automation
Azure has a good solution namely Azure Automation. It can help you to
- shutdown the VM when you do not need it.
- Reducing the cost of Cloud App by reducing the scale out.
- Tracking and logging useful information for your justification and decision point
You read the automation here
Any others tip? Please share in the comment below!