The Public Cloud: The Hotel For Your Applications

Unless you are Larry Ellison (hi Larry!), the chances are you probably live in a normal house or an apartment, maybe with your family. You have a limited number of bedrooms, so if you want to have friends or relatives come to stay with you, there will come point where you cannot fit anybody else in without it being uncomfortable. Of course, for a large investment of time and money, you could extend your existing accommodation or maybe buy somewhere bigger, but that feels a bit extreme if you only want to invite a few people On to your Premises for the weekend.

Another option would be to sell up and move into a hotel. Pick the right hotel and you have what is effectively a limitless ability to scale up your accommodation – now everybody can come and stay in comfort. And as an added bonus, hotels take care of many dull or monotonous daily tasks: cooking, cleaning, laundry, valet parking… Freeing up your time so you can concentrate on more important, high-level tasks – like watching Netflix. And the commercial model is different too: you only pay for rooms on the days when you use them. There is no massive up-front capital investment in property, no need to plan for major construction works at the end of your five year property refresh cycle. It’s true pay-as-you-go!

It’s The Cloud, Stupid

The public cloud really is the hotel for your applications and databases. Moving from an investment model to a consumption-based expense model? Tick. Effectively limitless scale on demand? Tick. Being relieved of all the low-level operational tasks that come with running your own infrastructure? Tick. Watching more Netflix? Definite Tick.

But, of course, the public cloud isn’t better (or worse) than On Prem, it’s just different. It has potential benefits, like those above, but it also has potential disadvantages which stem from the fact that it’s a pre-packaged service, a common offering. Everyone has different, unique requirements but the major cloud providers cannot tailor everything they do to you individual needs – that level of customisation would dilute their profit margins. So you have to adapt your needs to their offering.

To illustrate this, we need to talk about car parking:

Welcome To The Hotel California

So… you decide to uproot your family and move into one of Silicon Valley’s finest hotels (maybe we could call it Hotel California?) so you can take advantage of all those cloud benefits discussed above. But here’s the problem, your $250/day suite only comes with one allocated parking bay in the hotel garage, yet your family has two cars. You can “burst” up by parking in the visitor spaces, but that costs $50/day and there is no guarantee of availability, so the only solution which guarantees you a second allocated bay is to rent a second room from the hotel!

This is an example of how the hotel product doesn’t quite fit with your requirements, so you have to bend your requirement to their offering – at the sacrifice of cost efficiency. (Incurring the cost of a second room that you don’t always need is called overprovisioning.) It happens all the time in every industry: any time a customer has to fit a specific requirement to a vendor’s generic offering, something somewhere won’t quite fit – and the only way to fix it is to pay more.

The public cloud is full of situations like this. The hyperscalers have extensive offerings but their size means they are less flexible to individual needs. Smaller cloud companies can be more attentive to an individual customer’s requirements, but lack the economies of scale of companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, meaning their products are less complete and their prices potentially higher. The only real way to get exactly what you want 100% of the time is… of course… to host your data on your own kit, managed by you, on your premises.

Such A Lovely Place

I should state here for the record that I am not anti-public cloud. Far from it. I just think it’s important to understand the implications of moving to the public cloud. There are a lot of articles written about this journey – and many of them talk about “giving up control of your data”. I’m not sure I entirely buy that argument, other than in a literal data-sovereignty sense, but one thing I believe to be absolutely beyond doubt is that a move to the public cloud will require an inevitable amount of compromise.

That should be the end of this post, but I’m afraid that I cannot now pass up the opportunity to mention one other compromise of the public cloud, purely because it fits into the Hotel California theme. I know, I’m a sucker for a punchline.

You and your family have enjoyed your break at the hotel, but you feel that it’s not completely working – those car parking charges, the way you aren’t allowed to decorate the walls of your room, the way the hotel suddenly discontinued Netflix and replaced it with Crackle. What the …? So you decide to move out, maybe to another hotel or maybe back to your own premises. But that’s when you remember about the egress charges; for every family member checking out of the hotel, you have to pay $50,000. Yikes!

I guess it turns out that, just like with the cloud, you can check out anytime you like… but you can never leave.