Breaking the Chains: Cloud Management for Start-ups
The last ten years have seen tech start-ups make an almost universal switch from building products on in-house infrastructure to building in the cloud. Start-ups were the early adopters that paved the way for medium and large size companies to increasingly consider cloud solutions in lieu of continued investment in proprietary or co-located data centers. Cloud service providers (CSPs)[1] have aggressively recruited start-ups with a ‘land and expand’ strategy. This strategy works well for start-ups in their early days: in exchange for highly reduced fees and access to attractive starter packages, early-stage companies begin to build their products and systems on the CSPs’ proprietary infrastructure.
While there are significant advantages to this model for early-stage tech companies, start-ups should consider three key challenges their peers have faced as they grow into cloud infrastructure: cost, new management demands, and multi-cloud complexity.
Cost: As companies begin to expand their dev, staging, and production environments, inertia carries them forward into higher-tier CSP offerings. Before they know it, start-ups find their cloud-related costs growing. Cloud-based compute, storage and networking costs — which at first looked like a steal compared to the capital expenditure of in-house infrastructure — quickly convert into large monthly bills. A start-up founder recently told a colleague of mine, he was scared off of a CSP solution because he never knew how big his bill was going to be when he opened it.
New demands: Alongside changing operating cost expectations for start-ups, the advent of cloud has also changed the roles and responsibilities of the technical team. New positions such as Full Stack Developer and DevOps emerged, requiring combinations of development skills, IT operations experience, and QA understanding. Within a start-up environment, these responsibilities fall on a small number of individuals who are under pressure to move from code to ‘potentially shippable product’ within weeks. Such roles have also migrated to the larger enterprise, driving demand for productivity tools to support these needs. This has not gone unnoticed, as new start-ups quickly identified the opportunity and have built a number of sizable businesses in the automation and optimization space. Tools such as Chef, Puppet, SaltStack and Docker are all focused on different stages of productivity enhancement and simplification, giving client companies a way to streamline the continuous delivery process.
Multi-cloud complexity: Scalable cloud services from CSPs can be “sticky.” The ideas of migrating from one cloud provider to another or building infrastructure across multiple clouds have filled start-up founders’ minds with dread. However, with the growing commoditization of cloud infrastructure and CSPs’ race to the bottom on costs, the model is shifting, and increasingly firms (large and small) are adopting multi-cloud environments. This has typically meant increased complexity. Firms making the multi-cloud switch must juggle a set of proprietary management consoles for their chosen set of cloud services, each of which may differ in the tools and processes offered by the cloud provider.
As is the case with the productivity tools reaching the hands of DevOps staff, a new generation of cloud management platforms has arrived to streamline the task of managing multi-cloud environments. These tools not only provide simplified management and governance across multiple CSPs from within a single platform, they also allow users of the services to work across cloud providers and leverage the cost and performance benefits of different CSPs. Tools such as Ostrato’s cloudSM provide an easy-to-use marketplace comprising products from the leading CSPs and allow easy provisioning and management from a single screen. Ease of use, integration with widely adopted automation tools, and the ability to deploy cost-saving tools (e.g., parking resources when not in use) make multi-cloud environments an increasingly attractive proposition. All three of the key challenges with cloud infrastructure introduced in this article — cost, new management demands on founders, and barriers to a multi-cloud environment — are addressed.
When the next monthly cloud bill comes in, remember that you do have options. Working with multiple CSPs is a lot easier than it once was.
[1] Customers who spend less than $50K per year make up the largest group of AWS users. Source: Public Cloud Usage Trends (2013) The Big Data Group.
