Over the last decade, we have seen a huge increase in public cloud adoption.  Recently, with many people working from home instead of working in the data center, more and more people have been looking at the public cloud services.

Let’s take a look at 5 things everyone should consider when choosing the best public cloud services and options for their business needs, and how they are all linked together.

Public Cloud Services Cost

First and foremost, the cloud is not free.  Think of the cloud as running your application in someone else’s data center.   Those costs you may take for granted in your on premises data center will come to light in the cloud.  While you aren’t necessarily getting a power bill, you will pay for things like your compute instances, network transfers, and storage.

These costs can quickly add up based on what type of compute instances you are deploying.

In the cloud, it can be almost too easy to deploy a VM with a ton of CPU, memory, and disk you don’t actually need.

Public Cloud Ease of Use and Operations

When it comes to any public cloud platform, there will be a learning curve for your administration and operations teams.

How easy is it for your teams to deploy and manage things in each public cloud?

How do your teams currently run things today?  Are you looking to make fundamental chances to this, like starting with an API first approach?

While this can be a good time to change some processes and practices with your cloud adoption, this too has a cost associated with it.

Your teams will have to be trained in administration and use of this new cloud platform, no matter which one you choose.  If you are going to make fundamental changes to your current methods, this will of course take even more training.  Keep in mind training your teams will cost you, in both time and resources.

Application Readiness and Architecture for Public Cloud Services

Are your applications ready for the cloud?  Do you even know what components make up the applications you would like to move?

It is important to take a close look at the workloads you wish to run in the cloud.  Are you looking at net new workloads, or do you plan to migrate current applications to the cloud?

In either case, it is important to make sure you have a good understanding of how the cloud you are moving to operates, which brings us to our next point.

Cloud Features and Functionality

Do the public cloud services options you are considering meet the requirements of your workloads?

Do you have a good understanding of how the cloud infrastructure you are moving to is architected?

While the on premises design principles you are used to will hold true in the cloud, it is important to understand what each cloud provider offers beyond the traditional compute, network, and storage layers.

Public cloud providers offer additional and advanced capabilities in these spaces to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Keep in mind that when it comes to public cloud providers, not every feature may be available in each region, so it is important to plan your deployments up front, before you even begin to put anything in the cloud.

Latency

The dreaded L word of IT infrastructure.  Latency may not apply if you plan on running 100% of your workloads in the cloud, but let’s face it, this may not be the case.

If you are taking a hybrid cloud approach, which most organizations are, chances are you may be deploying hybrid applications where some components are on premises and some are in the cloud.

In this case it is important to keep in mind the physical locations of your data centers to the cloud regions you plan on deploying in.

If your data center is located in the eastern united states, it may not make sense to deploy the cloud components of your application in Europe from both a latency and a cost perspective.

Concluding Thoughts

When you are planning a public cloud deployment and looking at public cloud services, it is important to make sure to do your homework up front.  Make sure you have an idea of what workloads you are looking to deploy to the cloud, and the components within them.

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