Cloud Service Management Challenges: Agility versus Cost Management
Cloud computing has shifted IT spending from a mix of capital expenditures (CapEx or CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OpEx or OPEX) to a more focus on OpEx. Instead of obtaining servers with a three-year lifespan, IT professionals are now purchasing access to computing resources. This approach enables developers to allocate compute resources as per their requirements.
Fremont, CA: Cloud computing has transformed the way enterprises perceive information technology infrastructure. A few years ago, IT professionals would make projections about the number and types of servers they might need for upcoming months to a year.
Cloud computing has shifted IT spending from a mix of capital expenditures (CapEx or CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OpEx or OPEX) to a more focus on OpEx. Instead of obtaining servers with a three-year lifespan, IT professionals are now purchasing access to computing resources. This approach enables developers to allocate compute resources as per their requirements.
Infrastructure and operations professionals serve two purposes: developers who are utilizing the resources those professionals manage and IT finance departments that allot budgets as well as set limits on the finances available for cloud resources. Developers are generally focused on having access to the necessary resources irrespective of the cost of them. Developers’ primary job is to develop software and run that in production.
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There are many advantages of allocating resources as required. Developers can set up test environments in minutes. They can utilize Blue/Green Deployments to roll out new services while minimizing the risk of transforming production services. Blue/Green Deployment is a technique that decreases risk and downtime by running two identical production environments, known as green and blue. The workload is gradually directed to the new version of the code until no load is directed to the old version of the code.
But resource allocation as required can also result in a pattern identified by Densify as uncontrolled micro purchasing—that is, suboptimal resourcing decisions that are harmless individually. Unlike being capable of spotting a long-running VM that must have been shut down, inefficient micropurchases are almost stealth unless one’s tools are designed for offering transparency into those suboptimal purchases.
