For some companies, the role cloud plays in their IT infrastructure is clear cut. Global streaming service Netflix took the decision almost a decade ago to “go all in” with the cloud for its compute resources. Partnering with AWS, it developed and built the functionality that powers the entirety of its service all the way to the point at which a user begins to stream content.
“We serve hundreds of thousands of requests per second, and we serve over one billion hours of content a month. All of this is running out of AWS infrastructure,” says Eva Tse, director of the Big Data Platform at Netflix. For a service like Netflix, elasticity and scalability are extremely important, Tse continues. The compute resource of the cloud gives Netflix the ability to spin up instances quickly to run tests and experiments. “Having a platform like AWS cloud that can expand and reduce its footprint based on traffic is really important for us.”
In addition to the cloud, Netflix deploys a proprietary content delivery network for streaming its service to end users. Its OpenConnect network, built inside ISP infrastructure distributed across the 190 countries it serves, ensures low latency in video streaming by not only locating content as close as possible to users but by anticipating demand and pre-positioning content accordingly. This church-and-state separation of compute and storage provides Netflix powerful service delivery with vast geographical reach.
UNEXPECTED CLOUD COSTS
For most organizations, however, the best way to integrate the cloud into their commercial operations is not so binary, and a poorly-assessed decision can prove expensive. A headlong rush to the cloud can leave some shelling out on costs they did not expect, such as the potentially expensive egress fees levied by the cloud service providers when you wish to bring data back to your data center or migrate to another cloud. Missing out on the opportunity to own and control increasingly affordable cutting-edge hardware of your own is another consideration. “Will anticipated increased availability and price drops in memory and storage, combined with easy-to-use hypervisor solutions such as Nutanix, give companies pause to rethink their cloud strategy and the impact on their P&L?” Stephen Buckler of Horizon Technology asks.
Working within a hybrid environment isn’t without its pitfalls. Things can quickly get lost between the cracks. To counter this, experts advise that companies assign ownership to a dedicated point of contact across a hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure and not have high-level accountability spread across numerous stakeholders.
For others, the hesitation to migrate resources to the cloud stems from investments already made into on-premise infrastructure. A 2018 study of cloud adoption in the United Kingdom conducted by cloud computing firm Skytap and 451 Research revealed that two thirds of companies surveyed were looking at migrating some of their legacy workloads to the cloud over the next year or two. At the same time, many of those large organizations had “significant concerns around the adoption of those cloud solutions within the enterprise largely due to a skills gap and a large investment in private cloud over the last two to three years,” says Chris Griggs of Skytap. Although 80 percent of the organizations surveyed expected that over the next three years much of their legacy infrastructure would be migrating to the cloud, the majority of traditional business felt restricted by the amount of tech debt they had.
CLOUD CAUTIOUS?
Even when your cloud migration is decided, experts agree on the need to stay vigilant in the face of the growing power of the hyperscale CSPs and the infrastructure access they offer. “While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organizations need to be cautious about IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market,” remarks Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “In response to multi-cloud adoption trends, organizations will increasingly demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offerings without penalties.”
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