Navigating the Complexities of Cloud
The term “cloud” has taken nearly every industry by storm as cloud providers have been ramping up, providing a wider and wider range of services over the years. Cloud computing offers the promise of efficiency, agility, productivity and IT cost reduction. However, as with most major technology shifts, the quickly evolving landscape comes with a lot of uncertainties and an overwhelming amount of choice.
Many IT departments are in various stages of making a cloud decision, often pressured by the conflicting pressures of managerial mandates, user requirements, budget, compliance and governance, not to mention the operating parameters of the applications themselves. This problem is so large, complex and nuanced that CloudGenera has made it its mission to simplify this decision making process as you and your company traverse the Discover, Decide, Do lifecycle of the application migration process.
Customers looking to consume cloud, the most intuitive model of migration is the simple “Lift and Shift” approach of migrating their existing applications to 3rd party providers. Generally speaking, this is a “low effort, low risk” approach that does not seek to re-design or re-architect applications before they are migrated. While this approach is fraught with issues and concerns (that’s a whole other article), it allows us an easy window into the complexities a customer may face when trying to make a choice on where to place their workloads.
VM Shapes and Sizes
Today, we will focus on the “shape”. IT professionals who operate in a traditional datacenter model are familiar with a smaller number of “shapes” and “sizes” but cloud providers offer a multiple range of services. For example, a common shape like a 4×8 typically consists of 4 vCPUs, 8GB of RAM, and some amount of associated storage of varying sizes.
Looking at the marketplace as it stands today, Amazon Web Services alone provides 10 choices of that specific size, across various series optimized for different types of workloads. Things get exponentially more complicated when you go multi-cloud. The one you chose will depend on the workload as well as the optimization of the workload.
Customers starting on their cloud journey can be halted here by the sheer volume of options available, but choosing the right VM can be as simple as matching your workload against the VM type that is equipped to run that workload. If your business is one where you need a high performing database, the memory-optimized VM type is your best option. If you are a graphic designing company, a GPU VM is the best. For big data companies, a high-performance compute VM is ideal because of the powerful CPU.
The best advice is to start small and grow big so that you don’t get lost. And as always, CloudGenera is here to help navigate and evaluate the myriad of cloud options. Real-time cloud provider capabilities offer increased confidence while reducing risk.
Next month we will dive into the varying memory requirements customers face during their discovery phase. Subscribe now for updates!
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CloudTalk is provided by the Cloud Research team at CloudGenera. As the industry’s best-in-class IT decision engine, CloudGenera is continually focused on delivering insight into the emerging trends, patterns, and innovations which impact technology decision-makers. CloudGenera is committed to helping you make better technology decisions in minutes, not months.