I got the impression from the twitter traffic that the outage tonight was due to a MS outage.

Can someone in the industry please explain to me the great cost savings and benefits of the cloud?

I see more issues than it's worth on a daily basis with my clients.

The cost of scaling and maintaining is minimal compared to having it in house.

Microsoft has a large team to get environment back up. Very unlikely to have that confidence inhouse

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Microsoft has a large team to get environment back up. Very unlikely to have that confidence inhouse

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and yet we were down for 3 hours.

Is the primary cost of the in-house environment the labor cost of having our IT maintain the servers, because most of my clients that are hosted also have full IT staffs?

On the hardware front, in-house teams may not be able to resolve issues as fast as 3 hours (in some cases). They may not have the resources and availability to get parts.

In regards to being down for 3 hours, I wouldn't consider that cloud computing as a whole is a problem. The problem is with Microsoft.

I'm not saying it is the right method for all needs, but it does have its advantages.

I come at this from a SQL perspective in which I can have my clients completely up and running within a matter of 1-2 hours with a complete hardware failure (with new server and good backups). I don't know the hardware infrastructure side very well but I do know that every one of my clients that are hosted experiencing varied levels of latency which cause heartburn for my ERP users. The amount of time my users have to wait for certain functions far outweighs benefits from hosting the environment.

I also know that with managed services and drive/server redundancy, down time is highly unlikely with the right non-hosted environment (I know this can also be configured in a hosted environment as well).

I do know there are benefits from hosted environments but my experience so far is that it is more costly rather than less costly. Every time I discuss this I also make my general disclaimer that the future might change my opinion.

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Can someone in the industry please explain to me the great cost savings and benefits of the cloud?

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It's trendy to say "we're in the cloud!".

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It's trendy to say "we're in the cloud!".

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Exactly my thoughts. Microsoft marketing!

The cost savings can come from a lot of places. I speak more to AWS rather than Azure

-Don't have to invest in additional hardware to handle a burst of volume. For example, a retailer that gets increased traffic for Black Friday. You can pay for the extra capacity just when you need it, not for the year
-Only run dev/test environments when needed. My dev and qa teams don't need their environments up at night, so we can shut them down from 5pm to 7am. That's 14 hours of time that I don't have to pay for
-If you use the hosted services, you can save money on personnel needed. As an example, I can pay 4 DBAs to manage a MongoDB cluster, or I can use DynamoDB service on AWS instead. I'll probably only need some time from the devs now, instead of requiring a full DBA team
-The ability to stand up an environment in minutes, try something out, and tear it down again is tremendous. I can, very easily, instantiate an environment with multiple services, all running multiple instances, all with load balancing, including code deployments in about 15 minutes. I can tear it down in about 5. Even better, my developers can do this as well. That code (more scripting than coding) they used to provision the environment is an asset that can be promoted to PRD as well. This flexibility is available from your own VMware environment, but only with the purchase of pricey additions, and that doesn't translate to cost savings.

There can be a lot of cost savings, only if you really embrace the methodologies and practices. You example of SQL server isn't a good one. SQL server isn't very cloud friendly, primarily due to licensing, and would really be an archaic service to try and push to the cloud.

In your opinion, is the cost savings across the board, or is it better realized in smaller companies?

For me, I've seen the cost savings work on both ends of the spectrum.

- More resources dedicated to the core business vs. resources dedicated to the infrastructure
- Faster turn around time for virtual resources
- Scalability aspect is huge for large companies. As mentioned by kb, Black Friday is huge. I used to host large online campaigns on the infrastructure side. It didn't make sense to put together a huge infrastructure just to handle the 2 days of high traffic. I could host it on AWS for around 5k a month, or build an infrastructure that could handle the max capacity and be in the 100k+ range (outside of bandwidth and network equipment). The $5k a month can be stopped at any time. You own the equipment after spending 100k if you go the in-house side.

Also want to mention that Microsoft is the #2 provider for a reason..and outages is mainly why.

Managed servers and the cloud are also different in a way.

At my company, we own all the servers, but they are managed at a offsite facility. Building a hardened facility would be a big cost for us, so we run our (scaled down) dev environments onsite, and our test and prod systems are managed. From a hardware monitoring standpoint, we probably save some there on the overnight coverage.

Given that our company has several divisions spread around the country and one in the UK, we probably also save some trouble being at a facility that has a faster connection to a trunk line (instead of having enough bandwidth at our facility to run all divisions, we use the data center's connection).

The cloud that most people refer to is pretty much providing a full environment. With more servers and more users, the cost of service tends to go down because (like a VM server on a massive scale) they can overcommit server resources without as much consequence. It's an economy of scale that works in favor of providers like AWS.

Uptime is usually very good for these environments as well since the VM's load can be automatically shifted around in the event of a hardware failure. Most companies aren't going to spring for a entire hot spare environment. It sounds like MS isn't as good with uptime as Amazon.

Many huge web companies are hosted on Amazon, so it must make sense for large companies at least. For smaller companies, the flexibility is probably an even bigger deal.

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In your opinion, is the cost savings across the board, or is it better realized in smaller companies?

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Both. I was at re:Invent last week, and heard an executive at Coca-Cola describe a 40% savings by moving their marketing campaigns to AWS instead of hosted on-premise. Their onus to move came from a Super-Bowl ad campaign that crushed their infrastructure. After spending 6 months expanding infrastructure, and testing to a volume 10x greater than they expected, the actual volume they got was even greater and they couldn't handle it. Interestingly, their initial analysis showed a 10% cost increase by moving to AWS. It was the other things that drove costs down: shutting off dev/test environments when not in use, reduction in operational costs; faster dev time for new campaigns, etc

For smaller companies, the initial infrastructure investment to build an HA environment is steep, at a time when the company is trying to deliver value and get off the ground. The quick turn around from devs, the ability for devs to provision and tear down their own environments without a steep learning curve, and the fact that you don't pay for it when you're not using it are savings that really add up over time

Take it with a grain of salt, I just came from the AWS conference, and heard success stories all week, so my mind is probably a bit biased right now

we are fully on AWS, so I agree with kb2001 on most if not all of what he said. I did not go to the conference though.
For us, the flexibility the infrastructure provides is key. our SaaS solution doesn't need to accommodate customer bursts, but the flexibility we have to move traffic/processing around to do upgrades, fixes, etc and provide our customers with zero downtime is huge. We are a company of 20 people and I cannot imagine what would be needed to in-house what we need, maintain it AND give the level of security we require that AWS allows us.

Regarding the SQL Server argument - SQL Server and the cloud are not two peas in a pod. Licensing kills you. Now, that being said...we use SQL server for our SaaS solutions. We offset our license costs because we are gold development partners so we get a large discount, so that helps. We are single point of failure at the RDBMS level right now, which sux. We do not offer a high volume SaaS product (just due to the nature of the business) and do not necessarily need to be HA. So, SQL Server works.

to address the above concerns, we are in the works to move to Postgres...it solves a lot of technical challenges we have as well as cost savings.

People wouldn't be moving to the cloud if there wasn't ROI to do so. People are not doing it just to be trendy. And for the comment about "Microsoft marketing"...you are leading people to believe the cloud is a Microsoft thing...it's not.

As far as that 3-hour outage goes...I have no idea what happened but it is just another example of why they are #2.

This is why they were down... http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-says-storage-service-performance-update-brought-azure-down-7000035999/

Not that it really matters but aws has had downtime too... they all do its more a matter of how long and how frequently.

Amazon is the very clear cloud leader now. And Microsoft is #2. Everyone else is fighting behind them including IBM. I am not a cloud user so I have no personal experience. I think Microsoft is gaining.

if you read the link and comments below that jagouar1 posted you will realize what MS did...they rolled out changes across all their regions at once.

the purpose of deploying a cloud solution across regions is for when updates like this are needed by the IaaS provider, you can easily roll services to Region B while Region A is being updated, and then move them back thereby not affecting uptime. The rollout of changes should have been region incremental, not across all at once.

So the technology is not the problem, its the poor execution which is why people get frustrated.

Customers had HA deployments - ACROSS REGIONS - to avoid this, yet MS pulled the rug right from under everyone and even customers who spend boatloads of dollars to remain HA got whacked with downtime for hours.

CapCityMan-

Instead of Postgres, you should look into Aurora, the new RDS service announced last week. Allegedly, the performance is an order of magnitude better than MySQL. It supports MySQL's flavor of T-SQL language, so it may be an easier transition from SQL Server than it would be to move to PlSQL on Postgres


To build on Spicewood's statement, here's the Gartner magic quadrant for cloud service providers, from May 2014

AWS clear winner, MS close behind and gaining, though Amazon's announcements last week are putting them more in the DevOps pipeline with code management, deployment management, and a service to manage and deploy docker containers.

Sorry for the image size

Infrastructure will never go away but I see the customer base dwindling to fewer, massive organizations, basically supporting the cloud.

Competiton is going to be the suck and margins thin as balls.

Thin apps or docker is interesting.. Perhaps make monies just rehashing the old for the new.

I'm really surprised to see Google and Rackspace so far down the list.

I thought the rankings were:
1. AWS
2. Azure/M$
3. Google
4. Rackspace

If some can set aside their Microsoft-bashing Redmond is doing a good job. They are in it for the long haul and investing heavily. They know how to run datacenters (as does Amazon). Amazon is the leader for a reason.

I don't know anything about what's behind PostGre vs. SQL Server but I caution anyone when the get too far from the mainstream databases. The availability of tools, including security, drops off quickly, the further you go from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and MySQL.

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I'm really surprised to see Google and Rackspace so far down the list.

I thought the rankings were:
1. AWS
2. Azure/M$
3. Google
4. Rackspace

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Rackspace is focusing on a different game now than the IaaS big guns, they are looking at more of the managed cloud space which goes back to the roots of the company and Fanatical Support, etc... Rackspace doesn't have the money to be able to play the price cut game that AWS/Google/Azure play every year.

Rackspace also doesn't have the money to go international like the big guns as well... they do have some international presence but nothing like aws and azure which is required to really have a chance in the market.

I don't know much about this space beyond what you hear on the twit shows but it seems there are 2 big reasons azure is getting marketshare...

1. most of the enterprise world runs on ms products and ms has better integration than any other cloud provider.
2. ms has been very active in courting the open source community and their cloud and because of that is more flexible in what it can run.

The reason I don't think most are choosing google is they don't do anything better than what aws already is doing and they don't have the enterprise legacy like ms.

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I don't know anything about what's behind PostGre vs. SQL Server but I caution anyone when the get too far from the mainstream databases. The availability of tools, including security, drops off quickly, the further you go from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and MySQL.

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PostGres has been around for a long time and is pretty mainstream in open source communities. Postgres had a lot of the Oracle-like features (views, triggers, etc) several years before they were added to MySQL.