Migrating to the Cloud makes sense

Why not? if you can increase availability, robustness and flexibility at reduced cost. And it is feasible for a majority of business applications today.

Let’s examine each of the above aspects using a generic multi-tier web application and compare a traditional deployment (datacenter or collocation facility) vs. a deployment on a Cloud Service e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Sample Configuration

Traditional Deployment AWS Deployment
  • 2 Dedicated Servers
  • Storage / File system built and configured for high-availability
  • 2 AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers
  • 100GB of AWS Simple Storage Services (S3) – Provides data storage in a reliable fashion
  • 100GB of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) - Persistent storage that is attached to running EC2 instances
  • 500GB of monthly data transfer
  • AWS Elastic IP addresses - Network high-availability is enabled at a small charge by AWS

1. High-Availability (HA) and Robustness

In a traditional hosting environment the applications are highly vulnerable to hardware failures. While it is feasible to increase HA, it does not come without significant increase in cost. AWS comes with built-in capabilities for HA at a fraction of the cost of building your own HA solutions.

2. Flexibility

In an AWS environment, additional resources can be made available almost immediately at small incremental cost. Likewise if the system load reduces, it is easy to release the additional resources in the AWS environment with no further financial commitments.

In a traditional deployment, scaling the HW infrastructure resources, is not an easy tasks, it is time consuming and expensive. Capacity and resource sizing is typically specified to address future demands with financial commitments done ahead of time. And irreversible if the actual demand is much lower than expected.

3. Cost

Traditional Deployment AWS Deployment

$450.00 per month*

*Typical average cost of the above configuration amortized over a 36 month period plus monthly operating/hosting fees.

$260.00 per month**

**Assuming the 2 EC2 servers are running 24 hours a day, each day of the month

 

In the above example we see using AWS results in a savings of about 42%. Cloud computing may not be appropriate for every application and the savings may vary based on configurations and usage patterns. But real benefits are possible and available to organizations that identify applications that are appropriate candidates for migrating them to the Cloud.