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Contact UsSo this is an interesting question, many small businesses are finding the cloud extremely useful but how will the enterprises incorporate it? I am sure you have all seen the Microsoft commercials aimed at the consumer “to the cloud!”, and I am sure most of you have used a cloud app before like drop box, Salesforce, Netflix etc but again what is the best way for enterprises to test the water?
Move your development environment to Amazon-
- All developers using the same pay as you go resources. This means that you only pay for the servers that the developer's need at that time, use a script that will boot the boxes at 8AM and stop at 6PM, no more moving 4 year old retired prod boxes to development and wasting money fixing them!
- Developers NOT using resources in a million dollar private data center. Can you imagine if you just built a new data center and things are working great, all new gear humming along. Now look at the utilization across your VMware clusters and SAN, wow 35% of the cluster is getting used for development! So you are stuck in a cycle where you need to prepare for the worst case, say it is 100 million users hitting your app or site, so you build the data center for that and in the first year you are losing 25-35% for development!! Now you’re already planning for next years budget to add more resources, not in the cloud!
- Instantly clone and deploy to every developer!! Taking app and data snapshots have been around for a while and it is not cheap in physical data centers. It is a line item you add at a large cost to the SAN frame and VMware servers so you can hot clone and deploy. Now take a look at the cloud, say developer 1 is just finished coding something and you want to let all 20 developers work off that master code…. easy as a few right clicks on AWS.
- Load testing. Do I really need to say anything here? If you were a developer would you rather go and do your own load testing in the cloud with no impact to anyone or Load test on the 4-year-old hardware in your datacenter and risk slowing down production? Or better yet go and ask your network admin and sys admins when it will be a good time to do some serious load testing; they might chuckle a little bit then say NO.
- Keeping the IP. Lets say you are on the final stretch to getting a golden master of your app or site or whatever it is and you need to bring in some consultants to help out. Say you bring in 10 consultants for 3 weeks. Now they are not employees so they most likely do not get computers owned by your company, they use there own. Now lets also assume that you do not have the time to make a VMware desktop for all of them because it is 10 people for 3 weeks, not worth it. Now 2 weeks in and 2 guys don’t show up anymore and you call the company or agency and they say “yeah sorry about that, this was the first job they worked for us. Guess they did not work out! We will send 2 more out tomorrow morning”. Ok great back up to 10 guys plus your full time staff but wait, the two new guys show up and they sit down and you say, “ OK fellas just start where they guys who left stopped working”. Then realize that they were not checking the code back in to SVN and you do not have the laptops they were working on. Now if you’re having you’re teams developing in the cloud no issues? All the code is up in your companies account, done deal.
Think about it, all developers using pay as you go resources, managing them with out much help from sys admins and have the access to quickly clone any environment and have all developers working on the same stack in your AWS account… perfect.