Why (or Why Not) to Migrate to the Cloud

A lot of technical forums and discussions have highlighted the limitations of EC2 and how it loses  on performance when compared to physical servers of equal cost.  They argue that you can get much more hardware and bigger iron for the same money.  So it then seems foolhardy to turn to the cloud.  Why this mad rush to the cloud then?  Of course if all you’re looking at is performance, it might seem odd indeed.  But another way of looking at it is, if performance is not as good, it’s clearly not the driving factor to cloud adoption.

CIOs and CTOs are often asking questions more along the lines of, “Can we deploy in the cloud and settle with the performance limitations, and if so how do we get there?”

Another question, “Is it a good idea to deploy your database in the cloud?”  It depends!  Let’s take a look at some of the strengths and weaknesses, then you decide.

8 big strengths of the cloud

1. Flexibility in disaster recovery – it becomes a script, no need to buy additional hardware
2. Easier roll out of patches and upgrades
3. Reduced operational headache – scripting and automation becomes central
4. Uniquely suited to seasonal traffic patterns – keep online only the capacity you’re using
5. Low initial investment
6. Auto-scaling – set thresholds and deploy new capacity automatically
7. Easy compromise response – take server offline and spinup a new one
8. Easy setup of dev, qa & test environments

Some challenges with deploying in the cloud

1. Big cultural shift in how operations is done
2. Lower SLAs and less reliable virtual servers – mitigate with automation
3. No perimeter security – new model for managing & locking down servers
4. Where is my data?  — concerns over compliance and privacy
5. Variable disk performance – can be problematic for MySQL databases
6. New procurement process can be a hurdle

Many of these challenges can be mitigated against.  The promise of the infrastructure deployed in the cloud is huge, so digging our heels in with gradual adoption is perhaps the best option for many firms.  Mitigate the weaknesses of the cloud by:

• Use encrypted filesystems and backups where necessary
• Also keep offsite backups inhouse or at an alternate cloud provider
• Mitigate against EBS performance – cache at every layer of your application stack
• Employ configuration management & automation tools such as Puppet & Chef

Quora discussion – Why or why not to migrate to the cloud?