Comments on: What’s the benefit of the cloud?

By: Sean hull

Sean hull — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 17:01:20 +0000

Great post Baron. I’d boil it down to two things… Commoditization – and all the business benefits that implies & automation – the abstraction of infrastructure as code.

By: Daniel Nichter

Daniel Nichter — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:52:42 +0000

I was similarly confused about the benefit of the cloud until–for whatever reason–the PLMCE 2012 keynotes made it click in my mind. You may recall, Baron, that before Percona I worked in a datacenter, so I have some background in hosting and whatnot. For me, the cloud is as you said: “thinking about resources instead of machines”. Working at that datacenter, most customers had to think about and then rent and then maintain machines. Granted, there’s always been “managed dedicated hosting” and hosting providers like HostGator, but I’m talking about what a customer has to do when they want to launch a “full-fledge” web app, for example. As you know, I’m about to launch a web app, and although I have all the necessary skills to set up and maintain my own dedicated boxes, LAMP stack, SSL, etc, I chose to use the cloud instead–dotcloud.com to be exact. So the cloud allows me to get those resources as paid, on-demand services that someone else sets up and maintains, which in turn allows me to focus on coding. That to me is the benefit of the cloud: less ops, more dev.

By: Robert Hodges

Robert Hodges — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:26:19 +0000

I believe the cloud drivers are more economic than technical. If you take the Amazon implementation as the model for cloud, here are a few of the advantages for customers.

1.) Low up-front capital expenses. You can start a business on Amazon using a credit card, and a lot of people do exactly that.

2.) Reduced operational staff. Keeps businesses smaller and more flexible.

3.) Overall better uptime than many internal IT organizations can provide. That’s for the entire infrastructure not specific hosts. You need to work a bit to maintain that advantage, of course.

That’s the “pull” side. It’s particularly strong for start-ups. There are a couple of big advantages for software vendors, which is where the “push” comes in.

1.) Scale. Amazon and clouds offer a channel to large numbers of customers. It can change your revenue numbers by 10x over direct sales models. VCs won’t fund you if you don’t explain how you leverage this model.

2.) Get paid for open source. The metering model allows open source companies to offer software as a service but keep the parts open source licensed. It gives them a workable business model.

Theo’s article (thanks for the link) has a great summary of the downsides or more accurately what you have to in order to make the cloud work. The important thing to keep in mind is that for some companies the choice is not cloud vs. something else but doing it in the cloud or not at all.

By: Peter Laursen

Peter Laursen — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:20:23 +0000

What is the benefit of the cloud is we will only see after 5-10 years. Things are in the making.

What is the benefit (or the opposite) of gmail as compared to traditional setups with a mailer daemon on yor userver/for your domain + traditional mail clients installed locally on every desktop? I think it is a comparable question.

With the Cloud you will focus on content – not technology, because (to a large extent) others will take care of that for you.

By: Shlomi Noach

Shlomi Noach — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 05:38:01 +0000

In this land Amazon is the king. And the thing is, they created a Cloud with great management tools, services and supporting API. Is the API part of the cloud? I can argue that it is not. Are the extra services? I can argue that it is not. API? Doesn’t have to be part of cloud.

It’s just that Amazon did in fact create such a nicely supporting environment for their cloud; and it’s hard to imagine a cloud without all these niceties.

So it’s down to “what IS a cloud?”. It’s an open question, there’s no mathematical definition and we can argue all day.

For me, the cloud IS in fact “Scalability!” “Easy provisioning!” “Flexibility!”