For IT, Business Managers & DevOps

A common view into your Cloud IT

Shadow IT in public clouds is thriving - BMC-Forrester survey shows

BMC Software and Forrester recently published results of an interesting survey of over 320 Cloud Computing IT leaders.  Key takeaways were:

-  Shadow IT is well and thriving.  The response to a question on "Actual behavior with respect to cloud" showed that 60% allowed both mission critical and non mission-critical applications into unmanaged public clouds.

-  Agility is the prime motivation for business to adopt cloud computing
-  Existing IT complexity is made worse by unmanaged public cloud services
-  Fine grained security auditing and policy based resource allocation are two highly desirable capabilities in cloud computing

Just as Enterprise IT had to deal with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) it is clear that enterprise IT has to deal with shadow IT in public clouds.   Is it time to start calling Shadow IT for what it really is - Business IT?   The findings above leave little doubt that Governance and Control of public cloud environments is a necessary compensating factor wherever Shadow IT is present.
Brian Singer from BMC adds additional perspective on this survey here.

Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

better insights 

Earlier today, GigaOM published a cost comparison of self-hosting vs. hosting on AWS. I wanted to bring to your attention a few quick issues that we saw with this analysis:

Lower Costs in Other AWS Regions - The comparison used the AWS costs for the US West (San Francisco) Region, ignoring the fact that EC2 pricing in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) is lower ($0.76 vs. $0.68 for On-Demand Extra Large Instances).

Three Year Reserved Instances - The comparison used one year Reserved Instances, but a three year amortization schedule for the self-hosted hardware. You save over 22% by using three year Reserved Instances instead of one year Reserved Instances, and the comparison is closer to apples-to-apples.

High Utilization Reserved Instances - The comparison used a combination of Medium Utilization Reserved Instances and On-Demand Instances. Given the predictable traffic pattern in the original post, a blend of High and Low Utilization Reserved Instances would reduce your costs, and still give you the flexibility to easily scale up and scale down that you don't get with traditional hosting.

read full blog at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/be-careful-when-comparing-aws-costs.html

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the trailblazing provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has changed the dialog about computing infrastructure. Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking, AWS is always an option to consider, and for many new businesses, it’s simply the default choice.... more 
http://gigaom.com/2012/02/11/which-is-less-expensive-amazon-or-self-hosted/

Cloud Cost an issues for all?

"But the published pricing model didn't make many waves because few bothered to do the math."
http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/platform/231600672

It has been 3-4 yrs since we all have started deploying & using IaaS stack to suffice different business use cases that we have. Though cloud has been a proponent for on-demand virtual resource utilization it is becoming apparent that it adds up to a huge cost once your deployments become serious & more dedicated.

Came across this article which bubbles up the same with GAE though same pattern is becoming obvious with other vendors like Amazon/Rackspace & more.

Good news, Attribo is spearheading in this direction & soon will announce GA for Attribo Cost Control Center for one to have a much clear & more actionable cost control strategy.