How to become a ‘dynamic’ cloud user to reap cost and agility benefits

Source – cloudcomputing-news.net

As organisations move towards more sophisticated multi-cloud environments, leveraging DevOps, containers and more, they will see greater agility, lower cost, and faster time to market.

This is the verdict of digital performance monitoring and management provider New Relic, who gathered more than 500 responses from organisations across the US, UK, Germany, and France. As first reportedby ZDNet, the company put its findings in an eBook, ‘Achieving Serverless Success with Dynamic Cloud and DevOps’.

New Relic put organisations into three categories based on their responses; traditional data centre users, static cloud users, and ‘dynamic’ cloud users. The latter are defined as ‘exploiting the cloud in a dynamic way, automatically allocating and de-allocating resources on the fly for maximum agility to deal with spikes in demand and accelerate time to market’, as the report puts it.

Not surprisingly, dynamic cloud users are more likely – 23% more likely, to be precise – to be utilising emerging technologies, such as function as a service (FaaS), containers, and container orchestration.

Even less surprisingly, the differences in where dynamic and static cloud users place their workloads are vast. Dynamic cloud users are at minimum splitting their resources equally between private data centres and the public cloud, with 80% going down this route. This contrasts with only a handful of static cloud users, and an even smaller number of traditional data centre users – although some of the latter were going all-in on public cloud, a situation which eluded the static cloud users polled.

More than anything else, the dynamic cloud is reaping serious dividends. According to the research, these organisations are more likely to see improvements in application uptime – 26% compared to 19% for static cloud – operating costs (21% and 9% respectively) and client satisfaction (36% and 15%).

So what makes organisations ‘dynamic cloud’ users? Use only the resources you need, allocate and de-allocate resources on the fly, and use resource allocation as an integral part of your application architecture. The survey also noted the importance of making sure you’re using multiple cloud service providers; more than two thirds (68%) of dynamic cloud companies said they expected to use three or more vendors in three years, while only 30% of overall survey respondents say they only use a single public cloud vendor today.

“To take advantage of many of the most important benefits of cloud computing, you need to do more than simply move all or part of your application to cloud-based servers in a simple migration,” the report noted. “And while maintaining some of your applications in the cloud and some of them in your own data centres can be an effective part of a migration strategy, it is not a long-term solution to maximise the benefits of the cloud.”