Just because you have software packaged as a virtual machine and running in Amazon EC2 does not mean you have a “cloud” offering.

As easy as it sounds in most cases when a vendor claims they have their software available as a service/cloud offering – it is just that: a virtual machine image (such as Amazon Machine Image – AMI) and maybe a hosting partner eager to host this virtual machine for you.

The latest report from Gartner’s Lydia Leong “Software on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud: How to Tell Hype From Reality” talks about dealing with vendors who hype their solutions as “cloud” offerings when in reality they are not. She points out all the additional things you need to consider in these cases, such a:

• Whether the application is capable of scaling up horizontally (by adding more instances) – tip: in such pseudo-cloud offerings in most cases the answer is no, or at least not automatically.
• Whether the application got re-architected to deal with internet-level delays when working with storage – if not you are getting a very unreliable service.
• Whether you have to deal with Amazon bills, projecting the load/consumption, selecting proper instance size and other options and changing these over time, and so on – all these items add up to your total cost of ownership (TCO) fast.

I personally would say – just avoid these solutions. If the “cloud” offering does not abstract all the scaling, machine management, and resource consumption tasks from you – this is not a real SaaS offering, and most likely it will turn out to be more expensive rather than less expensive.

You will probably save on hardware maintanance (depends on the period of time and whether you have hardware in excess already) but you will spend far more worrying about all the new “cloud” administration tasks which you have never done before. These are new issues, new challenges and they introduce additional risks and costs which you will find hard to predict.

A real cloud offering:

• Charges you for what you get (e.g. number of your users accessing the system, number of mailboxes in the cloud, the period for which your backups are kept, and so on)  – which makes your costs predictable and not relying on the underlying implementation,
• Handles all the underlying infrastructure (scalability, security, configuration, and so on) for you – you just get the service and don’t know or care how many virtual machines are running somewhere to make this happen.

These are definitely the principals we have for our Quest OnDemand solutions, and the ones every “cloud” solutions should implement. Good to finally get a Gartner report articulating the cloud hype misconceptions. Get it here.

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Analysts, Cloud Computing, Gartner, hype, SaaS, TCO
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