28 April 2014 Posted by Andrew Bohling
The industry is teeming with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, each marketing the unique capabilities and benefits of their services. It would be great if service providers also highlighted their solutions’ shortcomings. But this is rarely the case, especially when competing solutions share the same feature gaps.
When evaluating and purchasing IaaS services, you must be aware of the things cloud service providers don’t advertise, and may not want you to know. To help you avoid surprises and setbacks, we’ve constructed a list of 12 considerations.
1. Many IaaS providers oversubscribe their instances
When service providers host multiple tenants on shared hardware, the combination of virtual resources they’ve allocated to each tenant is usually more than the total hardware capacity. This can result in poor performance – and inconsistent performance – when competing instances get used heavily. Some providers avoid this practice, or offer dedicated instances, but charge a premium price. For some applications, the premium is worth it.
2. Service level agreements (SLAs) are often just a marketing tool
Five-nines availability does not mean services will be available 99.999% of the time. This is simply the objective, and may not be realistic whatsoever. You may or may not receive sufficient refunds to cover unexpected downtime. The same goes for other elements of your SLA. Service providers generally anticipate downtime, and may or may not be penalized when SLAs aren’t met.
3. Not all your applications will work well in the cloud
Too often, businesses make investments in infrastructure services that won’t support their application’s functionality. Some applications require consistent compute, storage and networking performance that most multitenant public clouds simply can’t achieve, and may work best on dedicated hardware. Unfortunately, not all service providers make this option available.
4. Setting up and managing applications in the cloud takes effort
Most infrastructure services make resource provisioning easy, and some even provide features like one-click application deployments. But cloud infrastructure – and the applications deployed on it – must still be managed, maintained, and integrated with on-premises systems. Moving your legacy applications to the cloud will take multiple coordinated efforts, and, following deployment, you’ll still need to perform ongoing tasks, such as monitoring, analytics, patching and upgrades.
5. Hardware does matter
There can be significant benefits from using best-of-breed hardware to support your high-performance applications and services. This is especially true when your applications have not been designed to scale in and out as demand changes, or when they haven’t been architected to achieve massive IO with spinning disks. For example, relational databases often need high-end, scale-up hardware to meet peak performance requirements. Likewise, high-performance applications may need the drastically reduced latency that only specialized hardware like SSDs can provide.
6. Network bandwidth will cost you
While most IaaS providers advertise the low cost of compute resources, storage, and the like, they usually don’t highlight the cost of data transfer. Customers generally must pay for data that is transferred in or out of their public IaaS environment, although some providers wave the fee for incoming data. If customers need to access and deliver applications at top speed, they might also need to purchase connectivity solutions that bypass the public Internet.
7. Backup services may not be reliable, and might not actually work
Many IaaS providers offer backup and recovery services, but they might not be suited to your applications and workloads. It is common to lose backup data from the cloud, just as it is with on-premises environments. A 2013 Symantec survey showed that 47% of enterprises had lost data in the cloud, and 2/3 of these companies had their recovery attempts fail.
8. 24/7 service support doesn’t mean 24/7 service management
While the promise of 24/7 support seems like an attractive feature, it does not mean you’ll have a dedicated team maintaining your service at all times. Unless you are working with a managed service provider (MSP), you will still need a team to monitor and manage everything above the hypervisor. And they’ll need to coordinate with the service provider to troubleshoot issues.
9. Even large service providers go under
Service providers – and businesses of all kinds, for that matter – have reputations to maintain, and will not generally announce business failure until the last minute. Consider the failure of Nirvanix. By many measures, Nirvanix appeared to be succeeding: large, high profile customers; outstanding technology; innovative businesses model. Yet, they went out of business, and with fairly short notice. An escape plan can be invaluable, even with the most “trusted” providers.
10. Moving in is comparatively easy to getting out
Moving to the cloud can be a challenge in itself, so you might not be prepared for the major challenge of getting out. If you rely on unique services and features in one cloud, you may need to modify your applications to get them to work in another. This can require redesigning or recoding the application, and you may need to purchase tools to assist with migration. Data transfer can also be expensive if you have a large amount that must be moved to a new environment.
11. Cloud services won’t necessarily save you money
Some businesses adopt cloud services based on the assumption that “cloud is cheaper.” Indeed, many service providers advertise cost savings as a primary benefit. The truth is that cloud services can be equally, if not more, expensive than existing solutions. Businesses must also factor in the cost of building or deploying their applications in the cloud, as well as establishing the right connectivity and backend support. While cloud services can yield cost savings in some cases, other benefits – such as agility, flexibility, performance, and scalability – are often where the true value lies.
12. There is rarely a single best public cloud
Service providers would like you to believe that their cloud can address all your IT needs. But, it’s likely you’ll need multiple cloud services to meet your different customer demands and application requirements. Some clouds provide better performance, while other provide better prices. Some clouds offer a greater variety of services, while others do a few things really well. Don’t be afraid to choose different clouds to meet the unique needs of different applications in your portfolio.
The benefits of the cloud exist, but realizing them takes careful planning and an understanding of the limitations that service providers don’t advertise. Be sure to look beyond the marketing hype to avoid costly missteps that could put your cloud plans in jeopardy.
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