Week Notes S0E1 Why using the Cloud saves $
Originally published on Medium on April 24, 2018.
Colleagues in the consulting industry and clients frequently recount the common maxim that moving hosting to the cloud saves organisations money, but seem to rarely understand why .
So to avoid my future repetition the below will hopefully answer the basics of the question.
Improved Utilization
By sharing the same Capacity (Infrastructure) with more Capabilities (Apps) you in aggregate have higher utilization of the available capacity without risking impact on quality, performance and safety metrics through clever (usually automated) load balancing.
Economies of Scale
By aggregating capabilities in the same capacity you can optimize and share common processes, technologies and requirements to reduce duplication and increase delivery/operational efficiency. This includes both App services such as common APIs and operational services, such as patching and cyber-security.
Of course the potential downside is the impact on resiliency and complex dependencies, but these can be mitigated.
Improved speed of Delivery
By taking advantage of shared services and capacity delivery teams can take advantage of methodologies such as Devops, Microservices and Serverless architectures to deliver capabilities faster, for lower cost and with higher quality than previously possible.
Increased pace of ‘Innovation’
The cloud does not just increase the speed of delivery, it can increase the pace of ‘Innovation’ (AKA building new shiny stuff) too. I put a lot of this down to team members and leaders gaining valuable ‘headspace’ to dedicate to quiet time considering their market, their customers and their technology. In the bad old days meetings and management were full of worries of supportability, hosting requirements and security controls; in the world of the cloud these are all but a click away.