What The Cloud Can Do For Your Infrastructure

Currently, cloud computing is synonymous with your business being up to date with technology. However, there’s more to it than just following industry trends. The benefits of a cloud based infrastructure impacts your ability to deliver keystone features, automation, leveraging integrations and drive the cost of running your business down.

Software is like the house you own and your infrastructure is the digital piece of land you rent from cloud providers. This can prove much cheaper in the long term and much more flexible than owning your own infrastructure.

Here is a concise guide on what the cloud can do for your infrastructure, your software and your business costs.

Owning vs Renting

Unlike land, the value of hardware depreciates completely within 5 years. When you build your own infrastructure, the capital used to purchase hardware becomes an instant sunk cost. While the same could be said for Cloud based infrastructure, when you leverage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the final total cost is often significantly smaller.

This is because with IaaS, you are often getting charged per hour or charged per 100k to 1 million calls to an instance. The cost itself is usually cents per hour, with free tiers for set up trials and experimentation. With major players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s Azure competing with each other on price and available services, your business is constantly open to potential opportunities in cost structure innovations and services available.

With the rise of micro services, hybrid solutions and automation, IaaS providers also give your software the ability to be constructed in a manner that leverages these cost savings further while eliminating the need for upfront hardware capital investment, ongoing operational expenses and indirect costs such as downtime and unscheduled offline services.

What it Means for your Developers

When developers have access to infrastructure and are given the ability to create as needed, you are able to leverage the DevOps role more effectively. Agile teams are often cross functional teams with members being experts in more than one area.

This enables developers to think about the software they’re creating for you as part of a whole, rather than just code in isolation. It lets them think about things like maximum socket connections to databases, how to leverage micro service structures and any other services that the IaaS provider has.

When developers are able to leverage services offered by the infrastructure provider, they are able to increase the efficiency of their workflow through automation and integration of deployment processes, staging for different scenarios and code auditing sessions.

Elastic Infrastructure to Cater to your Growth Demands

The cost effectiveness of IaaS is not just limited to positive and a much lowered cost to your overall IT budget, but also your software’s ability to scale based on demand.

Elasticity of availability is baked into how IaaS works and is often one of the main factors for business’ usage of cloud. Cloud providers are now also providing tools such as integrated reporting, the ability to create complex but cost effective systems using best hardware management systems that your business doesn’t have to worry about. Availability zones across different countries can also enhance your business’ delivery and responses based on customer target groups.

For example, if your business originally served US based customers but want to also expand to the Australian market, cloning your current infrastructure to a IaaS center in the Pacific Ocean region will result in better response time than a US based IaaS center.

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Growth is the ability for a business to adapt to market requirements quickly and efficiently, and a well structured cloud solution often allows for software to leverage cross distribution and maximize its potential usage. The ability for automated scaling can also mean that your business has the opportunity to capture customers that would not have been catered to in instances where there is an unexpected spike in usage. 

The cost of owning your infrastructure can be a massive hit to your budget when it comes time to upgrade. If your business runs on this model, shifting to a cloud based solution can give your software the flexibility and elasticity it needs to adapt to your market demands and needs.

Co-authored by:

Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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