Dumping gear in the public cloud: It’s about ease of use, stupid

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

Public cloud computing has finally started to make sense to me now. A recent conversation with a fellow sysadmin had me rocking back and forth in a corner muttering "that’s illogical". When I emerged from my nervous breakdown I realised that capitalising on the irrationality of the decision-making process within most companies is what makes public cloud computing financially viable.

For certain niche applications, cloud computing makes perfect sense. "You can spin up your workloads and then spin them down when you don’t need them" is the traditional line of tripe trotted out by the faithful. The problem is that you can’t actually do this in the real world: the overwhelming majority of companies have quite a few workloads that aren’t particularly dynamic. We have these lovely legacy static workloads that sit there and make the meter tick by…

Most companies absolutely do have non-production instances that could be spun down. According to enterprise sysadmins I’ve spoken to, they feel that many dev and test environments could be turned off approximately 50 per cent of the time. If you consider that there are typically three non-production environments for every production environment, this legitimately could be a set of workloads that would do well in the cloud…

Read more from the source @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/06/the_public_cloud_is_about_ease_of_use/