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

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.