What happens when you run out of Cloud?

Cloud Computing is generating excitement in IT because it promises to improve responsiveness to the business and reducing the cost of infrastructure during non-peak periods.  Some of the excitement comes from an expectation that that cloud capacity is not limited.   It is a fallacy.   The simple matter is that cloud infrastructure, whether you manage it yourself as a private cloud or it is outsourced in a public cloud is still based on a finite number of servers, a network that requires care when changing and a finite amount of storage at any one time.   How do cloud vendors plan on dealing with this?   The same way that your infrastructure team would deal with it -  monitoring capacity utilization and forecasting the need to expand.   There will always be limits to the power, space and possibly network connectivity to data centers, so cloud vendors will need a strategy for managing this also.   While cloud provides a great solution to the speed of provisioning and cost reduction through improvements in capacity optimization, it still has some traditional underlying issues of capacity management.   

Here are some strategies for managing your risk of running out of Cloud.   They are not mutually exclusive

Negotiate to manage risk

Negotiate contracts that either give you guaranteed capacity or early notice of capacity limits.   Guaranteeing capacity will require that you be able to forecast how much capacity you will require in the future.   This option puts your capacity management gurus in the same situation that they have always been, except they now need to forecast yet another set of resources.   Early notice of capacity limits is an alternative, if you can get this agreement from your cloud vendor.   The notice period would need to be greater than the length of time it would take to negotiate alternative Cloud resources with your current vendor or another.

Use a 2 Vendor Approach

You could start with a strategy that you plan to have a primary and a secondary vendor for Cloud.   You could choose to be your own second vendor as an option.   The assumption of this approach is that your two vendors will not run out of capacity at the same time and you can either shift resources to the secondary vendor or you are always managing application capacity across your vendors.

Build for Cloud Flexibility

Build an application/infrastructure strategy that facilitates allocation to alternative Clouds.  Being indifferent about where servers or services are to be deployed requires some critical architecture decisions.   Some key requirements would be that the application can provide sufficient performance given the range of network latencies that are possible.   Another requirement would be that the release management process and toolset supports deployment to alternative clouds.   

Like earlier shifts in technology including mini-computers, desktop computers, client-server, and the rise of the Internet, there is no turning back from Cloud Computing.   Once you start using it, you will be hooked.   Now is a great time to start planning how you will implement it before you end up in a fog (sorry).  

T3 Dynamics has been focused on leveraging Cloud Computing for its own business and the challenges of monitoring hybrid environments.