So your $8K savings represent a puny 3.1% savings of
your compute spend, and a much smaller percentage
of your overall spend when you include storage and
networking.
Do you see the pattern here? Savings are always good,
but the true savings will NOT come from using cloud
as a “rent-a-server,” or from spinning up servers for
only 1 minute instead of the full hour. You should
absolutely expect your cloud infrastructure provider
to charge you less as they realize additional cost ben-
efits from economies of scale. You should also expect
your cloud provider to offer a simple price structure
that a normal person without a Ph.D. can understand.
And you should not fall for the gimmick of “look, we
now charge you per second” if all of your servers run
24×7.
The True Cost Savings
So what does this all mean? Savings from vendor
price reductions and charging for smaller increments
are byproducts of technology innovation and econo-
mies of scale, and should be expected. True savings
on the cloud will come from the following:
30 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2018
1. Conducting a proper analysis of your applica-
tion portfolio estate, and understanding how
well those applications are suited for the cloud
2. Designing the most appropriate application
architecture that considers interconnectivity,
resiliency, high availability AND takes advantage
of cloud-native features and PaaS capabilities
3. Performing a true TCO of your cloud estate and
basing that TCO on the proposed cloud
architecture
If you haven’t performed the three steps above
(whether you haven’t started your cloud migration
yet or have simply moved some applications via the
“lift-and-shift” approach), you have not done yourself
justice in figuring out what your true costs–and best
savings–could be.
The following three aspects are core to our Cloud
Adoption Program methodology by which we help
our clients realize significant advantages (cost, tech-
nology and business value) from public cloud.
Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.