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Customers are leaving the cloud in droves. Allegedly.
Or at least that’s the excuse AWS is using with the UK Competition and Markets Authority to avoid being pushed into changing its business practices according to a recent article in tech red top The Register.
A closer look by IDC however indicates the percentage of customers that are repatriating workloads to on prem are in the single figures. Who wants to bet these customers had a “lift n shift” approach to cloud adoption?
Now you probably think I’m knocking them. Using the term “lift n shift” disparagingly, as it so often is (I wonder who benefits from that…). But I’m not.
Cloud evangelists and your favourite Cloud Solution Architects will no doubt argue that your move to cloud should be accompanied by a re-engineering of your application to be more cloud native. This will make best use of the cloud resources, keep your costs down and give you the greatest benefits of cloud adoption. All of that is true. But its not the whole truth.
Cloud native is generally lauded as the goal. It shouldn’t be. Cloud native means your applications are locked into the cloud you’ve decided to adopt. It may also not even be the most coft effective option. That’s not where you want to be.
I prefer to aim for something I like to call Cloud Optimized for our clients. If the spectrum spans from Lift N Shift to Cloud Native then Cloud Optimizied sits somewhere between the two. Perhaps it looks a little like this
Lift N Shift ➡️ Cloud Aware ➡️ Cloud Optimized ➡️ Cloud Native
What you should be aiming for is taking advantage of the inherent elasticity of the cloud but not getting locked into a particular implementation of it. In the reams of high performance computing this is even comparatively easy. An HPC example of the above may look something like
24x7 always on servers ➡️ Capacity Reservations ➡️ Script based dynamic capacity scaling ➡️ AWS Parrallel Compute Service/ AWS Batch ➡️ AWS Lambda Functions
If you think AWS Lambda is a great idea for your HPC workloads please come and speak to me before signing those blank cheques!
