6 01732 759725 CLOUD Kelvin Wetherill Why hyperscale cloud solutions aren’t always the best solution, despite what they might tell you. By Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK Hyperscale or hyper headache? major headaches when it comes to migrating from one platform to another. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t something hyperscalers tend to shout about, so many businesses don’t realise just how high the costs of switching can be, not to mention the significant time and resources that are also involved. Issues like this are why the majority (57%) of respondents in Leaseweb’s recent study said they found it challenging to migrate workloads out of a public cloud environment, while 49% had encountered difficulties in understanding their overall cloud usage costs. The end result is that over half (55%) of UK IT professionals currently trust public cloud services less than they did two years ago. Fortunately, the impact can be fairly minimal when only basic services are being used, but the more involved businesses become with a provider, the harder (and more costly) it is to untangle themselves should they need to. A great example of this is AWS’s S3 object storage offering. Initially it’s a very convenient service to store new data at a low cost. However, as a business starts to generate higher and higher data volumes, AWS’s pricing model means it quickly becomes extremely expensive to move away. Scaling costs can quickly spiral As a business grows in popularity, the scaling of underlying resources and increased usage can quickly result in unforeseen invoices due to the intrinsic pay-per-use models used by hyperscaler platforms. For many customers, this means they may need to hire dedicated consultants to manage their hyperscale infrastructure usage and prevent costs from spiralling. Pay-per-use models aren’t a silver bullet Many hyperscalers also offer payper-use models that, again, can The ability to deploy almost anything to a hyperscale public cloud environment has perpetuated the image of them as a go-to solution for all IT professionals in recent years. However, could this glowing reputation be slowly changing? Only recently, Ofcom announced an investigation into the largest public cloud providers in the UK, citing the issue of fair competition in the market. Furthermore, recent research from Leaseweb found a range of concerns that IT pros have about public cloud providers – most notably a deterioration in trust levels over the last two years regarding cost visibility and ease of migration. This article will take a closer look at some of the main pros and cons of hyperscale public cloud environments. Hyperscalers present an attractive prospect to start-ups Hyperscale public cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are incredibly popular for a number of reasons. Firstly, they provide ready access to all the tools and infrastructure that businesses need to get their cloud operations off the ground immediately. They are also easily accessible, and the seemingly infinite number of service options and resources they offer make them highly attractive to developers and start-up executives alike. In short, they make starting and growing a business so simple (at least on paper) that it’s hard to look past them. However, once you scratch below the surface a little, a number of issues begin to appear. For instance, while all hyperscalers offer similar services, each one is built using proprietary technology and processes. As a result, it can be very difficult for developers to easily switch between them if desired. While this isn’t quite as severe as “vendor lock-in”, it can result in high switching costs and seem very enticing at first glance, but are not quite as simple as they first appear. While no one likes to pay for something they’re not using, many businesses also tend to under estimate just how often they need to run certain applications. In some cases, applications might even be required 24/7 or can’t be scaled down when the load isn’t high enough. A ‘cheap’ pay-per-use model can become very expensive . Businesses don’t need to go all-in on hyperscalers to benefit from what’s on offer Going all-in on proprietary hyperscaler solutions may not be the best option for many businesses, but that doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from what hyperscalers have to offer. Often, the ideal approach is to opt for infrastructure-as-a-service, which utilises open source software solutions to run services on hyperscaler platforms. This way, they can maintain a better grip on both their flexibility and independence while still capitalising on the powerful technology that hyperscalers have to offer. Running software on standard infrastructure services at a ‘fixed’ fee (known as pay-per-reservation) with a hosting provider typically also helps ensure predictable invoices at the end of the month. Despite the economic turbulence of the last few years, Gartner predicts enterprise IT spending is still set to grow by more than 5% in 2023, meaning investment in the sector is extremely healthy. However, growing caution surrounding proprietary cloud technology means more and more businesses are looking for cloud solutions that give them the benefits that hyperscalers have to offer whilst still maintaining as much control as possible over their applications and costs. Doing so ensures greater business stability at a time when uncertainty is the last thing any business needs. For more info please visit: https://www.leaseweb.com Terry Storrar
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