The adoption of public cloud computing has now become common place amongst digitally focused organisations both large and small. The ability to pay only for what you consume on a per minute basis means a welcome shift, for most people, away from the traditional CAPEX model to an OPEX monthly billing plan.
This change is allowing companies to utilise funds and distribute them in other areas within their business. The benefit of being able to build highly flexible and scalable infrastructure on demand without the need to purchase expensive hardware, software and licenses is vastly lowering the time to deliver solutions and in most cases lowering costs as well.
The transition to an OPEX model also means processing power and capacity, that until recently was only available to companies with deep pockets, is readily available to smaller companies with pockets that do not reach as deep. Having the bragging rights to being able to access huge teraflops or flip flops or something like that, is no longer reserved for the CTO’s or IT managers of banks or large enterprises. Public cloud, especially Microsoft’s Azure platform, has brought enterprise grade computing to the masses on a biblical scale. Looking at the services, capacity and global reach the Azure platform offers publicly it reminds me of ‘Skynet’ from the Terminator films, the artificial intelligence that wants to destroy the human race. But don’t worry, I doubt that the AI in Azure is planning on global genocide…..let’s hope not eh?
Whilst cloud computing is great because it is flexible, dynamic and scales on demand, it is equally as scary, because it is flexible, dynamic and scales on demand. Users with administrative access to Azure subscriptions have the ability to create services at their leisure, allowing them to build and develop services and applications that previously, would only be available to those with deep pockets. I’m not denying that this is absolutely wonderful and is proving to be a game changer, but there is also the fact that these wonderfully powerful cloud services cost you money!