Data Definer39
Q8: What is the role of 'hyperscalers' (AWS, Azure, etc.). What "gotchas" exists? What are the advantages?
Chris Maki
The main advantage is cost and easy of deployment, but people need to be aware of all the hidden extras, simple things such as RAID protected data aren't always included.
Adam J. Bergh
One big advantage to cloud providers is the economies of scale that they can achieve. Think CostCo vs a mom and pop grocer.
Krishna Subramanian
A customer told me that hyperscalers are a great place to squat but not a great place to live at.
Chris Maki That's a great way to put it, I've had a few clients try out such services only to pull back in-house as their experience was less than stellar.
Nick Howell
In a word? Trust. Netflix has been running on Amazon for years, and those guys, in my opinion, are inventing all kinds of new stuff for the cloud that enterprises will eventually adopt. Amazon, Microsoft, VMware have all been around for years.
Sean Luce
These platforms are a great place to "kick the tires" of public/hybrid cloud. Pay for only what you use until you are ready to take the plunge.
Chris Maki Also a great place for your dev/test environment, especially if the data is disposable/recreateable.
Sean Luce Yes, a great sandbox to develop workflows, strategy and DR plans.
Aaron Delp
They are good for some unique corner cases as well (super high scale test workloads)
Enrico Fuiano
We introduced the 'World of many clouds' a couple of years ago and we have seen this remain relevant. When it comes to Cloud Services there is no one size fits all. The challenge is to identify the best cloud for your business application.
Enrico Fuiano
Additionally, we live in an heterogeneous world. multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud. It is also a basic economic principle ... you ought to diversify your cloud sourcing options.
harleyguytx
A big advantage is speed of deployment (think clones) but often requires programming skills of some sort or a team of developers. Since there is no single "universal" API across all vendors, its complicated and often discourages businesses
Ed Morgan ☁️🦄 Vagrant does a pretty good job at unifying access into the main cloud providers
Aaron Delp
Many applications today aren't written to take advantage of AWS/Azure/etc. The underlying infrastructure doesn't provide the same level of redundancy that most Enterprises have come to expect
Enrico Fuiano
So the questions that need to be asked are .. Can you regain control of your data and applications? Can your trip to the cloud be bidirectional? Can you support a multi-hypervisor strategy? Do you have contingency plans?