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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.
survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year
Gartner reports that enterprises they surveyed "have plans". Just roll your eyes and walk away.
That way it will be easier to ship all of our IT responsibilities to India or China and not need any Americans involved. That entire cost center will be cut by 75%. What's not to like?
What's that? Corporate espionage?
Nah, they'll be paid well for their standard of living so they won't break the chain of trust. And besides there will be an iron clad contract in place, our lawyers will crush them in court if they do any monkey business.
Such a worrywart! C'mon over here young man and pour me another brandy!
Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate. ... Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University.
"This interconnection oriented architecture means we contract with colocation facilities where we can place our inspection tools and GE services into dense meeting areas of the multi-cloud environment. These are places where you find many cloud providers under one roof and we can place our services, inspection and data sets within them to obtain cloud agnostic, high speed adjacency."
"Another factor in making our journey to public cloud successful is our self-service (or what I call opt-in) approach, which allows business units to choose the services they wish to consume. People will naturally gravitate to high value, frictionless services"
"Running inside a public cloud environment, you're able to consume unlimited capacity as needed. Today, we scale up and down thousands of times in a day while we handle peak loads or run experiments."
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, it's other peoples servers, but there is more to it than that. We used to host physical servers at a data center. It was a huge PITA to get new servers provisioned. Moving to virtual servers on other people's servers (aka, the cloud) has been the greatest thing ever for us. Could we host the virtual servers locally? Sure. Do we want to? No. So for me the cloud is not defined by just being someone else's servers, but virtual servers running on some else's servers. It simplifies so much that we would never go back to physical servers or hosting our own virtual servers unless (probably until) some massive problem happens.