Chapter 2: Why Enterprise Cloud? 19
In essence, you’ re making an ownership decision based on each individual use case. Likewise, businesses want to balance owning and renting infrastructure, choosing between private( owned) and public( rented) infrastructure depending on application workload characteristics. In some situations, renting makes sense. In other cases, owning is a better choice.
Public cloud providers benefit from economies of scale in terms of lower costs, operational efficiencies through automation, and appropriate resource sharing, which they pass along as cost savings to customers.
Private clouds are better suited to predictable, well‐established workloads. For these workloads, you decide that owning the infrastructure is a better economic decision.
Before I move on, you should consider one more possibility. Suppose you travel all the time to the Caribbean. In this case you might want to own a car at that location, even though it isn’ t your primary residence. Owning may be less expensive than continually renting cars. Translating this example to the cloud, many organizations are discovering that, once they’ ve moved a certain amount of workload to the cloud, the economics begin to break down. A time comes when, regardless of the kind of workload, pulling some of the workloads back to the private datacenter makes the most sense.
At a certain point, the economies of scale tip back to favor onpremises private cloud environments. Make sure you have a deep understanding of your organization’ s needs so you know which workloads to run in which location.
Understanding data proximity and locality
Chapter 1 discusses situations in which people in certain regions of the world want to avoid having their data reside in certain other regions of the world. Public cloud providers have begun to address this issue by deploying new datacenters in new regions, but the need to maintain high‐level economies of scale can make doing so somewhat challenging.
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