Making Financial Sense of #PaaS, Part II @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

As pointed out by Mark, it’s very easy to make the cloud look financially attractive when pricing out a single application versus a portfolio of applications. Indeed, I would have to agree one of the most difficult things is to formulate an apples-to-apples comparison of cloud to data center. Even with the concept of reservations, the cloud cannot come close to the amortization of capital allocations across a portfolio of applications. The cloud is all about sizing and costing one application at a time whereas data centers should be all about economies of scale. For the original blog I chose to use a model where capital allocation was occurring on a project-by-project basis. This is a fair estimating technique given many businesses and government agencies use this technique as a way to procure hardware and software. However, it does skew the results in a particular direction. Additionally, as noted by Brent, the original $25,000 price tag could buy the equivalent of $48,000 worth of IBM BlueMix in GB-hours. Then, finally, Mark noted that even the Hosted PaaS has some operational component to them. He is correct here and that was a clear oversight in the original estimate. IT Operations should be reviewing the logs from the Hosted PaaS instance and monitoring the health of the application and its performance.

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