5 lessons from the Cloud about Efficient Environments

The week before last our team decided to divide and conquer to cover two simultaneous events.  Half of us headed to Portland, Oregon for OSCON and the other half stayed here in Austin to participate in hostingcon.

The Hostingcon keynote

Among those participating in hostingcon was my boss Andy Rhodes who gave the keynote on Tuesday.  Here’s are the slides Andy delivered:

(If the presentation doesn’t appear above, click here to view it.)

The idea of the keynote was to share with hosters the five major lessons we have learned over the last several years working with a unique set of customers operating at hyperscale.  Those five lessons are:

  1. TCO models are not one size fits all.  Build a unique model that represents your specific environment and make sure that you get every dollar of cost in there.  Additionally, make sure that your model is flexible enough to accommodate new info and market changes.
  2. Don’t let the status quo hold you back.  Not adapting soon enough and delays in rolling out solutions can cost you dearly.
  3. The most expensive server/storage node is the one that isn’t used (sits idle for 6-12 weeks) or the one you don’t have when you need it most.
  4. Don’t let Bad Code dictate your hardware architecture.
  5. Don’t waste time on “Cloud Washing.”  Talk to your customers about real pain points and how to solve them.

The WHIR’s take

The WHIR did a good write up of the keynote, here is the concluding paragraph:

So, it seems that cloud best practices will help companies reduce their physical infrastructure, which seems to be a bit counter-intuitive, given that Rhodes is representing a hardware provider. But it makes sense. Given the never-ending list of projects for IT staff, and as they drive down costs, their business will grow, and they’ll be able to increase their IT spend for innovative efforts. “What we’re hoping to do is let you do more with less.”

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

About the Author: Barton George