Turbulence Ahead: 7 ADVISORIES FOR THE CLOUD

As we gain understanding of the various architectures and offerings, and consider the scenarios that may best fit using the cloud, here are seven pitfalls for potential users to proactively manage.

 

1.  Costs & Cloud Infrastructure Providers

When Animoto Productions, a web service that enables people to turn images and music into high-production video, looked at how to meet anticipated peak processing requirements they turned to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2. With EC2, Animoto pays only for the server capacity they use, and they obtain and configure capacity over the web. In their capital-intensive business, their choice was to give a lot of equity away to invest in the infrastructure themselves, or “pay by the drink.”

When usage spiked one month, from 50 EC2 servers to 5,000 in one week, the decision was validated. Founder Brad Jefferson said he never could have anticipated such needs, and if he had, it would have cost millions to build the type of infrastructure to handle the spike.

But paying by the drink might make less economic sense once an application is used at a consistent level. When that time arrives, Jefferson says he might consider a hybrid approach when he gets a better sense of Animoto’s usage patterns.

2.  Costs & Cloud Storage Providers

Storage in the cloud, and its current cost model, is another area to examine closely. At about 25 cents per gigabyte per month, cloud-based storage systems look like a huge bargain, but the current cost models don’t reflect how storage really works. That’s because traditional internal storage systems are designed to reduce storage costs over the life of the data by moving older and less-accessed data to less-expensive media, like slower disk, tape or optical systems. Today, cloud companies typically charge the same amount from day one to day 700, so it’s not economical to store data in the cloud over a long period of time. As the industry matures, experts anticipate the pricing models will evolve to provide a less expensive, slower form of media for older data.

3.  Sudden Code Changes

With cloud computing, companies have little or no control when an application service provider decides to make a code change. This can wreak havoc when the code isn’t thoroughly tested and doesn’t work with all browsers.

This happened to users of SiteMeter Inc’s web traffic analysis system this summer. SiteMeter is a software-as-a-service-based (SaaS) operation that offers an application that injects scripts into HTML code of web pages that users want tracked.

In a July release of new code, visitors accessing SiteMeter-embedded web pages who were using Internet Explorer got an error message. When users began to complain, website owners weren’t immediately sure where the problem was. The resulting delay in tracking the source of the problem down resulted in frustration and negative reaction. Soon after, SiteMeter unexpectedly upgraded its system drawing ire because the new version was slow and impractical.

Over time, companies such as SiteMeter will learn to use beta programs, announce changes in advance, run systems in parallel and take other measures when making changes but meanwhile, its buyer beware.

4.  Service Disruptions

The much-discussed outages of Amazon S3, Google’s Gmail and Apple’s MobileMe underscore that cloud users need to prepare for service outages. Users should demand, as a start, that service providers notify them of current and even potential outages. Passive notification approaches, such as service providers’ own blogs, need to become more proactive. Some vendors are providing a status page where users can monitor problems or subscribe to an RSS feed or receive cell phone alerts that notify then when there is trouble, as well as give users feedback as to how to fix problems.

Understand your vendor’s fail-over strategy and then develop your own. Forrester Research advises customers to ask whether the cloud service provider has geographically dispersed redundancy built into its architecture and how long it would take to get service running on backup. Others advise prospective users to discuss service-level agreements with vendors and arrange for outage compensation.

5. Vendor Expertise

The promise of IT without the IT staff, is one of the most compelling enticements of cloud computing. Veteran cloud users are adamant that this is not what you get and contend that the elimination of labor is greatly exaggerated.

Because many cloud companies are new businesses, their expertise—especially with enterprise-level needs—can be thin. Experts advise it is essential to supplement providers’ skills with those of your own in-house staff.

The inexperience also shows up in application instability, particularly when users need to integrate applications for functions like cross-application reporting. These integration challenges are often difficult to master.

6.  Global Concerns

Today’s cloud vendors tend to have a U.S.-centric view of providing service, which can result in performance issues for users in other parts of the world. Solutions such as load-balancing servers on demand across the globe in places like the Pacific Rim, Russia, China or Australia, are far from being a reality today.

Some users outside of the U.S. are wary of hosting on servers in this country. They cite the Patriot Act, which increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical and financial records and eases restrictions on foreign-intelligence-gathering with the U.S. The Canadian Government, for instance, prohibits the export of personal data to the U.S.

7.  Non-native Applications

While some applications offered on SaaS platforms were originally designed for SaaS, others are rebuilt to work that way. If the offering is not born in the cloud, users deal with a different set of restrictions.

Whatever cloud computing may be to you—just another buzz word or a vehicle that may empower your company into the future—its becoming more and more essential to understand the potential and the storms you may encounter en route to the cloud.

Contact Software Consortium or call 1-877-850-9393 to discuss how to leverage our top-level talent to empower your business.

 

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