AWS Cloud and the COST visibility Revolution

 Everybody is looking for the cloud right now. Amazon Web Services(AWS) is leading and MS is getting aggressive with OSS and cloud, I think google was never competitive with cloud. The cloud market is ultra-hot.

However there are lot of side effects on this let's say cloud rush. The basic one is the fact if you have a low skill operator or low skill architect this guys are dead. Because today is pretty ready to have solid and great architecture almost for free using amazon AWS. Off course there is a lock in effect on this. Amazon strategy already migrate monoliths to the cloud using lots of cloud services, dont get me wrong this services are great but you have a big infrastructure lock in with this. And depending how you do in out application you can have application lock in as well because amazon is amazon is not a RFC or a JSR spec.


The Services 

Today are instances that can handle your legacy as it is of course that's not good not for cloud be for on premises as well. Coupling always lead to bad things, amazon has mantra with is cool, sexy and effective but is a vendor locking your while architecture will be coupled to the amazon specifics cloud services.

Some of this servos use the most standard OSS solutions like redis, memcached, Hadoop, MySQL and several others... With is great but there are features, interfaces and some lockin. Netflix uses lots of cloud(amazon) and have several frameworks and solutions for cloud but they have they own tools on front so it easier to migrate if they need. That could sound strange why migrate outside amazon when everyone including myself want be there? Well the history is funny is change amazon per oracle and change 20015 to 1990 what would be the difference? Is sense of innovation and technology aws is way superior but is the same lock in :-)

Infrastructure COST Visibility 

Before the cloud it costs was always hidden.  Due CAPEX companies with have annual budgets and was used to pay lots of money to vendors and wait a lot to have hardware in place. The cloud economics changed this view a lot. Today everything must be cost effective and it matters if you are using a micro or large instance, if you are using ssd or not if you have GPU or not it all comes down to lowering cost structure which is something fare that everybody wants and will alway want.

Today this is so explicit and there are monitors, charts, alerts and all sorts of mechanism to make that acknowledges and explicit for you.  So we will come to a time where the IT department will not be able anymore to justify costs without benefit and WASTE will not be tolerated any longer? why? because is not cost effective and if you can pay less the business will want for yesterday. That`s actually really great because it`s a natural force that will make us pay more attention to WASTE because now if you are not using resources you are losing lots of money.

The End of the Weak Architect: Cost Effective Solutions

All AWS solutions are automated and manageable, thats means if you are a dumb operator you are dead nobody needs you anymore. The same if true if you are a weak software architect or a power point architect, today we can great simple and scalable and cost effective architectures using EC2, load balancers, autoscaling groups, cloud front, route 53, RDS, SQS, Dynamo and so many other cool and easy to setup services. 

Scalability is not a issue anymore as long as you can pay for it. You still can have your crap code at your application layer as long as you find a way to keep delivering feature you have architecture and scale for you.  I`m being ironic, you really need to have good code but do you think your business will think about that or they will think about being cost effective?  So you need to learn CLOUD and AWS and you need to be way better than a simple solution architect or you are dead too :-). All think all changes are great because this will open space for more innovation and some kind of recycle on IT industry developers and operation guys was to low profile and really not catching up, now there is this big force of nature called cloud demanding changes and this is great. Software architecture become more complex because the cloud is not magic and you need to know what happens under the hood and you need acknowledge more variables now in your solution like being cost effective.

The Bottom Line is

Cloud computing is here to stay, it has several services for your infrastructure and architecture. This services allow you to scale your application with less cost. Because of this cloud made infrastructure COST visible again. Now software architect needs to worry about cost and have cost effective solutions. The IT industry is quickly adopting more and more the cloud, especially AWS. However the is a infrastructure, architecture and even a application lock in you need be aware. Operation guys need to be better than simple restarters and architects need to know more than scaling web sites, the industry is about to change driven by efficiency and low costs.  The cloud made infrastructure visible not only the COSTS but the efficiency and that revolution require you get more specialized and/or more innovative .

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco