I’m sure you have heard it many times, but flexibility is really one of key drivers that can lead to many organisations adopting a cloud first approach. The ability to grow and shrink, spin up and spin down environments to meet business demand has truely become possible because of the availability of cloud services.
Recently we had a real world example for one of our customers. We had designed and built a managed Staging and Production environment for their application in AWS. The customer had deployed their application and database to the Staging environment for testing and was ready to migrate to Production when they suddenly had a need to go live with what they had.
In AWS we were able to simply make their staging environment the production environment with a few simple changes – in this case renaming some services for our own management purposes. This was possible because we had designed the solution with the cloud in mind and with the same level of security in Staging and Production. As far as the customer was concerned, it was seamless with no effort required on their behalf.
In a traditional on-premises world, it would have taken days, if not longer. Even in a virtualised environment, no doubt the virtual hosts would have been running on a non-production virtual environment in a non-production network on non-production storage. Moving it into production would have required copying of the virtual machine and back end database to Production instance(s). Eventually, it would have turned out to be quicker to build up the Production environment from scratch instead of trying to clone or move the Staging environment.
The AWS cloud allowed us to provide a true production environment in minutes without have to migrate data or cause an outage to our customer’s environment. Now that’s flexibility!
