Selecting a Service Platform - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 64

• Get Started Quickly: Leverage cloud providers to get up and running as fast as
possible. Often the biggest cost is “opportunity cost”: if you miss an opportunity
because you moved too slowly, it doesn't matter how much money you were going
to save. Contracting with a public cloud provider may be more expensive than do-
ing it yourself, but doing it yourself may take months or years to build the infra-
structure and by then the opportunity may have disappeared. It is also true that
building infrastructure is a waste of time when the product's success is uncertain.
Early in a product's life the entire idea may be experimental, involving trying new
things rapidly and iterating over and over to try new features. Getting a minimal
product available to early testers to see if the product is viable can be quickly done
using public cloud services. If the product is viable, private infrastructure can be
considered. If the product is not viable, no time was wasted building infrastructure
that is no longer needed.
• Implement Ephemeral Computing: Use ephemeral computing for short-term
projects. Ephemeral computing entails setting up a large computing infrastructure
for a short amount of time. For example, imagine a company is doing an advert-
ising campaign that will draw millions of users to its web site for a few weeks,
with a sharp drop-off occurring after that. Using a public provider enables the
company to expand to thousands of machines briefly and then dispose of them
when they are no longer needed. This is commonly done for large data processing
and analysis projects, proof-of-concept projects, biotechnology data mining, and
handling unexpected bursts of web site traffic. It is unreasonable to build a large
infrastructure to be used for such a short span time, but a cloud service provider
may specialize in providing such computing facilities. In the aggregate the utiliza-
tion will smooth out and be a constant load.
• Use the Cloud for Overflow Capacity: Establish baseline capacity requirements
and build those in-house. Then use the cloud to burst beyond your normal capacity.
This is often more cost-effective than either building in-house capacity or exclus-
ively using a public provider.
• Leverage Superior Infrastructure: Gain an edge through superior infrastructure.
In this strategy the ability to create customized infrastructure is leveraged to gain
competitive advantage. This may include building your own datacenters to control
cost and resource utilization, or selecting IaaS over PaaS to take advantage of the
ability to customize at the OS and software level.
• Develop an In-House Service Provider: Create an in-house service provider to
control costs and maintain privacy. Often computing infrastructures are only cost-
effective at very large scale, which is why public cloud providers can offer services