Use Cases of the Cloud

Cloud Migration

One of the bigger use cases of the Cloud is the migration of production services from the organization’s existing on-premise solutions into the cloud.

Traffic Bursting

You may experience times within the year perhaps for predicted seasonal circumstances where your infrastructure takes a heavier load impact than that of other times of the year. Perhaps you are in the retail business, and over the Christmas holiday period demand increases on your infrastructure significantly.

In a classic data center environment you would need to provision the following resources to reflect this additional traffic:

All of this take up additional space, power, and cooling all of the time. This is not an effective method of scaling not only this, but there will be additional costs for this extra infrastructure to obtain, maintain and operate, and you may only use it for a couple of months of the year.

A far better method of handling this peak traffic road will be to look at cloud computing. The public cloud can be used to scale your networking resources to manage, and handle this additional traffic over your peak season. When the traffic has reduced you can then terminate your infrastructure within this cloud and stop paying for it. Remember you only pay for what you use when you use it.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Due to the public clouds built-in resiliency, and durability, this makes way for a great solution for your backup requirements. To a degree you have access to unlimited storage space with built-in data management lifecycle policies allowing you to make use of even cheaper storage.

For example, using Amazon Web Services S3 service, you can implement a policy to archive any data that is over 30 days old to another service called AWS Glacier which is a cold storage service with an even lower storage cost. The data is still available to you for as long as you have access to the Internet.

These storage services are often replicated by the vendor to ensure its durability. Couple that with a very low cost of storage, and you can see why more and more enterprises are adopting cloud computing for this very reason.

Web Hosting

Many organizations choose to host their web services on the cloud due to its ability to load balance across multiple instances as well as scale up and down quickly and automatically as traffic increases and decreases with demand.

The ability to provision, and implement automatic scaling simplifies the whole process and takes out much of the administrative input, and maintenance required. Not only can your web application, and database service be enhanced by design, but they can also make use of other services such as a content delivery network a CDN, and Domain Name Services DNS.

CDN

A CDN is a set of systems which redirects traffic to the closest caching server which can deliver the content much faster. As a resul, a CDN can reduce the latency of a website for users across the globe if there are sufficient caching servers in place. DNS services can help to manage demand on your web servers by redirecting any requests to a load balancer first.

This load balancer can then evenly distribute the requests to multiple web instances that you may have, therefore, reducing demand on a particular web server.

Test and Development Environments

Similar traffic bursting, you may not have the capacity to host lots of servers, and storage in your data center for tests, and development purposes and from a financial perspective this would be a huge expense.

Using the public cloud allows you to spin up instances as and when you need them, and then shut them down when finished. This also allows you to provision the size, and capacity of your compute resources say, for example, if you need a high-end powerful instance for your testing for an hour you can have it.

It would not be financially viable for you to have this wide range of compute resource within your own data center.

Proof of Concept

The cloud easily allows you to implement a proof of concept design and ideas to help bring them to life at a fraction of the cost for the reasons covered in the previous points.

This includes hosting costs and only paying for what you use. The results of your proof-of-concept can help you to build a successful business case when presenting to senior management.

Big Data and Data Manipulation

The cloud also makes it easier, and cheaper to manage big data. Maintaining and implementing compute resources to handle huge data sets can be expensive and complicated. By using cloud computing resources you have the ability to use only the resources you need to analyze data when you need it.

Some public cloud vendors offer specialized managed Big Data services. Which gives you a managed resource infrastructure, and framework to run your workloads on, in addition to allowing for scalability, scheduling, monitoring, etc.

Having some of these elements managed by the vendor allows you to focus on the data, and processing and not worry about the maintenance, or the underlying architecture.