![]() Why not reward your good customers with something that’s just going to go to waste in a split second? But if the clouds do this regularly, customers start to expect it. When cloud companies end up with a bunch of instances running light, they could give the extra clock cycles to the overburdened instances. Some of this is a challenge of managing expectations. Most of the time, the performance is so predictable and that’s why it can be surprising when one machine is markedly faster or slower. When I wrote to the tech support team, they had no obvious answer because the hardware came from the same pool. I’ve watched long, computation-heavy jobs speed up and slow down by 20%. Instances are sold like commodities stamped from a cookie-cutter mold but performance can vary. But control-freaks who like to ask questions will be frustrated by the way the cloud industry is often tight-lipped about all the details, except perhaps the lines on the itemized bill. Sometimes they’re being mysterious to improve security. Most of the time, the cloud companies are saving us from cluttering our heads with unnecessary details. Others ponder the street address for the data centers. Some wonder which technology is used to squirrel away the bits in long-term storage. Much about the cloud remains mysterious, with many questions left unanswered. Sure, it was more expensive but the simplicity of starting new machines made it so much easier to ignore the weakness. On this project, I compensated by just spinning up N machines that were 1/Nth the power of the Xeon box under my desk. But unless you’re willing to fuss over the machine yourself, installing and updating the operating system and letting it heat up your office building in the summer, it’s just simpler to start up a cloud machine. This became obvious to me when I noticed that the eight-year-old server under my desk was churning through some big optimization problems much faster than the big cloud instance that was costing more than $100 a month. Because of this, cloud companies can provide temptingly cheaper alternatives to hosting your stack on your own hardware and still price them with fat margins.Ĭloud computers are less powerful than they seem, perhaps because the hardware is often shared by dozens of virtual instances, each carefully allocated a small amount of RAM and CPU power. And this is all possible thanks to the tons of inefficiencies in the server rooms and data centers around the corporate world. A big chunk of its profits come from Amazon Web Services, which makes much of its money repackaging thin slices of computation and marking up the price. That’s a competitive business with tight margins. ![]() You’re paying a premium - even if it’s cheapĪmazon stock isn’t just soaring because hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers and delivery trucks bringing the world to our door. Between the DNS and the secret keys and the configuration files, the small details are often enough to make it easier to just keep paying a premium at one cloud, just to avoid the hassle of moving to another. When my part of the project ended six months later, he was still moving it. On one recent project, I was introduced to one senior engineer who was moving one block of services from one cloud to another. Even when your data or the services you create in the cloud are theoretically portable, simply moving all those bits from one company’s cloud to another seems to take quite a bit of time. But somehow the cloud world is surprisingly sticky. You’re locked in more than you thinkĪt first glance, selling a commodity operating system on commodity hardware should be a commodity business. Here are 10 reasons to be wary of when bringing your business to the cloud. Still, though much of the excitement around the cloud is merited and the business value is well-established, there’s also a dark underbelly to leaning on the big cloud vendors’ stacks. Stay on budget with these 6 cloud cost management tips, learn the 5 fundamentals of effective cloud management, and beware hidden cloud migration gotchas.
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