Benefits of Public Cloud
Greetings, World!
First things first! Apart from punctuation (which I suck at) and grammar, no AI was used to write this post. What a time we live in that one even has to mention it, right?
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Oleg, and I have worked in Software Development for the last 10 years. My current title at Cloudamite is Super Fullstack Engineer because over the years I have done DevOps, Cloud, Frontend, Backend, and Team Leading / Management.
So what about Public Cloud?
This is a good place to start – https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/public-cloud/
Instead of an on-premise approach, where all the computing and setup is managed by the organisation on their own, public cloud utilises a pool of resources that are managed by a Cloud Provider like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
At first, Cloud was just that—computing power that you rented from the provider to run your own software on. However, this has changed dramatically over the years as the Cloud grew like it’s a hurricane.
Check out this graph from Gartner.
Cloud Providers revenue is expected to hit almost a $1.0 trillion by 2025, while traditional solutions like on-premise are stagnating for close to a decade. Big business is clearly showing its trust in Cloud. Here is a full article by Gartner.com
Public Cloud Benefits
So, the trillion-dollar question is why. What is the benefit of the Public Cloud over on-premise solutions or renting raw computing power at the data centres?
The benefits are plenty, but the most important ones are cost and focus.
You have to ask yourself a question: “What is my business about?“. Are we in the business of running our own data centres, or are we in the business of banking, insurance, heavy machinery, or pulp production?
In most cases the answer is the latter. The focus of the business is on something totally different rather than computing. Let’s take an example of Netflix. They are a tech company, but are they in the business of selling computing? No, they stream your favourite movies and shows. And actually, Netflix traffic is a significant portion of the global internet traffic standing at 15% according to this article. So, is Netflix running their own data centres or relying on a partner? Partner it is, and it is AWS – Netflix AWS Case Study.
So in other words, what benefits do Public Cloud users get?
- * Focus on What Matters – use the expertise of thousands of developers an API call away
- * Cost – you can run on fewer personnel to achieve the same results, and there are a lot of ways to optimise cloud costs
- * Secure by Design – you don’t need to update OS images if you use Serverless or think about data centre physical access
- * Fast Onboarding – choosing a major Cloud Provider means there is talent available talent with expertise in the area
- * and many more…
Using Public Cloud does mean that you are giving away some of the control into the hands of providers. Your data is stored in a remote location, and you are dependent on a third-party business for a critical area of your own operations.
But aren’t you already? What about your bank accounts, insurances, electricity, and plenty more? You are not considering to start your own bank but why then are you still not on the cloud?
Case Studies Introduction
Since Cloud Computing has become a trillion-dollar industry, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there is an abundance of case studies on the topic of migration and potential benefits.
First of all, the big three major vendors provide case study catalogues with thousands of stories:
Here are some highlights of a few notable case studies.
Spotify – they migrated from bare metal to GCP. That project took multiple years of implementation and planning. Spotify’s own Chief Architect, Niklas Gustavsson writes the following about the results of migration: “We can innovate faster, by building services in this environment and finding better ways to build solutions that benefit our massive user base, taking full advantage of machine learning, data processing, and other opportunities.”
Finnair – “achieved substantial cost savings by exiting two data centers and migrating 70 applications previously hosted on approximately 400 servers onto AWS.” according to this case study. Also, due to COVID and slower-than-usual operations, migration could be done quicker than expected. I was actually working at Finnair just before COVID hit, and we in the digital services department had already been using the cloud for some time. While having a pretty lean team, we were able to provide a lot of value to customers, not least due to cloud flexibility.
Kone – according to this case study, Kone was able to unlock a whole new improvement of cost reduction with IoT and proactive maintenance where potential problems are discovered before they occur. Project used a particular product AWS IoT Core that is specifically designed for use cases similar to Kone’s, which allowed Kone to save time and focus on implementing the product rather than underlying technology. Also the sheer cost reduction in computing according to this article is 3x.
GE – another similar IoT project by GE Power. They are able to support the ingestion of 500,000 data records per second from billions of sensor tags. The capital expenditure to build one’s own computing capacity to support such volumes would have been huge, but with the Public Cloud such capacity is only clicks away.
Audi – had a car configuration software where the backend was hosted on bare metal. During the Public Cloud migration, they were able to save 63% of the cost while improving the service quality with cross-region hosting as well as improve their whole development process and become more Agile. Additionally, they migrated to the state of the art AWS Graviton ARM based instances, which are cheaper and faster.
Vero – needed to have a secure way to run analytics on the tax records of all of us in Finland. Cyberattacks have increased in recent years, and Vero was struggling to tell false positives apart from real threats. By using Microsoft Cloud tools, they were able to utilise Azure’s advanced protection options and make sure that the data of Finnish residents is secure.
Helsinki City – a few years ago, Helsinki City developed a system of dashboards with the objective of “With data, we can make the invisible visible“. They chose Azure since it provided a lot of ready made components for analytics and data handling which allowed them to move faster towards their objective of improving the quality of education in Helsinki. Again, a pattern similar to other case studies is clearly seen here.
10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need To Know – an interesting article with some more case studies for inspiration.
Conclusion
So, what do we have in conclusion?
First of all, thank you for reading! I hope I was able to drive home the thought of the potential Public Cloud benefits if executed right.
There are many pitfalls and potential risks in departing on this journey. But if done right, the benefits could be outstanding! Pretty much any organisation can benefit from utilising tools that Public Cloud provides.
This is the end of the first article in this series. See you in the next article about becoming Cloud Native!
