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[Note: this blog was originally published on cloudecosystem.com]
After attending several Cloud Connect events in Santa Clara, California, I had the good fortune of participating in the inaugural Cloud Connect event in Chicago last week. Scott Bils from the Everest Group ran the organizational readiness track that had a number of practical sessions related to cloud adoption. Troy Angringnon, from Cloud Scaling, and I participated in a panel discussion in this track titled “Current Thinking in Addressing Persistent Cloud Challenges.” This blog briefly summarizes one of the key takeaways that apply to a high percentage of cloud challenges.
During the session we talked about commonly raised barriers to cloud adoption. Each of the barriers or challenges came from the following categories:
- Security and compliance. This has to do with how organizations comply with privacy, data residency and system administration in private and public cloud scenarios.
- Performance. This covered architectural and other considerations related to reliability, uptime and latency for cloud applications.
- Vendor management and lock-in. This portion covered orchestration and management of workloads across multiple service providers as well as policies related to service-level agreements.
A main objective was to discuss whether the “barriers” in each of these categories are legitimate concerns without adequate answers or just convenient excuses to justify avoiding more aggressive cloud adoption. We did some research to find specific cases where cloud adopters had failed or succeeded with challenges such as ensuring performance and reliability in cloud environments. Perhaps not surprisingly, we were generally able to find both successes and failures for nearly every question we asked.
For example, we asked, “Does the lack of service level agreements (SLA) in public clouds prevent applications from being deployed?”
- Answer 1: No. Customers write cloud applications to overcome reliability and availability issues in public clouds.
- Answer 2: Yes. My existing application depends on highly reliable infrastructure to m
- Conclusion: It depends.
Interestingly, this pattern of answers repeated itself with every question discussed: no, yes, it depends. This makes it quite clear that strictly black and white answers are not the best way to addressing cloud adoption barriers. On the other hand, “it depends” is not exactly a clear guide to answering these questions in general. So we looked at the variables on which these answers depend. There were two primary variables, each with underlying variables:
- Type of Cloud. Public or Private? If public, is it built on highly consistent, commodity infrastructure – or on more traditional enterprise grade hardware? If built as a commodity cloud…
- Type of Application. Native cloud application, written to take advantage of cloud architectures including scale out? Existing application that requires highly reliable enterprise grade hardware? If it is an existing enterprise application…
The ellipsis (“…”) marks above are meant to show that more questions can be asked to get to the appropriate level of detail that provides the context in order to answer the question. However, the concept – and key takeaway from the session – is that whether or not a given challenge is a barrier to adoption depends greatly on both the type of cloud and the type of application in question.
While the cloud industry has evolved and improved, there are still too many people making black and white statements like, “clouds need SLAs” or “when you move an application to a public cloud, performance will suffer.” Clouds can absolutely be reliable, scalable, fast and secure. However, it depends on each particular situation. Cloud isn’t the right answer for everything. But don’t just buy into black and white myths. Don’t let imaginary barriers prevent cloud adoption. Instead, take a close look at your application requirements and your target cloud capabilities. Then pick the right deployment environment for your application, whether that is a traditional data center or a cloud.
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