Cloud Architecture Realizes 33% Savings and Faster Time To Market

In a previous post, I noted that Economics - specifically cost savings and moving from up-front capital purchases to on-demand usage - was a key reason to adopt cloud based services. Recently, Alliance helped a publishing and information services client design a cloud based deployment for a new information portal web application that saved 33% in infrastructure costs and saved months on deployment time. This is a typical content based online publishing application, with large content repositories, search indexes, innovative user experience, and community feedback widgets like recommendations and filtering.

The previous version of this web application was built and hosted in their corporate data center - which is a large and fairly efficient internal hosting operation. They follow ITIL standards, leverage bulk buying discounts, try to automate where possible, and many large billion dollar revenue web applications. But the internal hosting center is still in a craftsman mode - each new hosting application is custom designed, with very specific hardware specs and design, specific hardware ordered and configured for just this one application, and custom software installation followed for each and every machine in the environment. This type of craftsman approach is fairly typical in hosting (and software development) and drives a MUCH longer timeline as well as higher costs.

Cloud IaaS providers (like Amazon, Rackspace, or GoGrid) take a different approach - they give you a fixed set of virtual machines to choose from with defined compute specs and standard connectivity and let you turn them on at will. Instantly. Zero-delay. With no long planning, ordering, and set up. As you can imagine, this approach drastically reduces the time required to deploy an application to production. And it eliminates many of the error prone and manually intensive (and expensive) steps in planning, ordering, installing, and configuring hardware for the specific application. All of this is a clear win for IaaS over in-house hosting data centers. The Per Server savings are dramatic...

Combining a mix of on-premise database servers, data transfer costs, load balancers, and data storage costs gets the typical total cost savings to 30-40%. When you consider that by using a cloud IaaS solution you can scale instantly and incrementally to meet demand as you grow your product, you can easily add disaster recovery (DR), and you follow best practices like automated deployment it's obvious why cloud based application architectures are becoming the norm, even for typical "enterprise applications."