GE CTO On Moving 9,000 Apps To the Public Cloud

StewBeans writes: The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year. The article said that, "CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud." GE is apparently one of those few companies, because the CTO of Cloud for GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud. In the article, he explains how they came to this counterintuitive decision, their strategy for moving so many apps to the cloud, and why he's more optimistic about the public cloud versus hybrid or private.

Comments

MBA alert

[Anonymous Coward]

"We support approximately 9,000 applications at GE, and our enterprise IT efforts right now are focused on moving the vast bulk of them into public cloud. This may sound like a counter-intuitive strategy, but here is why it’s a great fit for GE."

MBA's bless 'em.

"In our environment, like many others, we ran the bulk of our applications on-premise in private cloud and highly-virtualized environments. Yet we were still dealing with the challenges of demand spikes without sufficient capacity. We had the desire to burst out to external cloud to solve these problems by leveraging a hybrid cloud. "

So you didn't add capacity internally, you bought it externally, and thus lost the biggest advantage of using your own servers: control and security. Worse you made the system more complex as they had to cope with some servers in the public internet.

Worse still, you're using misleading MBA speak. There is no such thing as 'private cloud'. You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled, then you moved those apps to servers controlled BY OTHER COMPANIES ACROSS THE INTERNET. Hopefully you put in the fallback plan for if the company fails, and take regular backups of your data on their servers to make sure you still keep it. What happens when the spotty youth they hired hands your app data to his frat friend? Because while internally the network admins forced security, you lost that when you lost control of your servers.

"However, if we were able to burst out to the external cloud to support our applications then why were we running the applications internally at all? This insight gave us a new perspective on the importance of public cloud in any strategy"

Having pissed away the advantage of having your own servers, what the hell, lets set ourselves up with a third party supplier and hope they won't screw us over... that's a plan right? It says here in "MBA World" that "all good MBAs are leveraging the cloud"!

CLOUD!

Re:Sure... they're large enough...

[lgw]

Unless they pay for it of course, and then they'll find out running it in house would have been cheaper.

In-house is almost always cheaper if you just look at server costs. But if you move enough stuff to the cloud you can get rid of a large chunk of your IT staff - it's a form of outsourcing. When that's true, you can come out way ahead. This is quite appealing to large companies that do all their IT grunt work through contractors anyhow - it's just a move from one group with contractual SLAs on service to another.

The cloud is also more appealing for services where each tier is a highly-available, load-balanced, stateless sea of servers. That sort of thing really benefits from the trivial and immediate server replacement you have from the cloud providers. (Something's wrong with Server-447? Just drop it and provision a new one, 5 minutes max.) But for simpler services that advantage is lost in the noise of manual software deployment/config/etc to stand up a new box.