Cloud technology, a synonym for modern day technology has been around for quite few years now. I myself got a nice experience with it and now i am sharing my feelings around it.
2012 seem to be a year of pure cloud for me. I migrated in-house physical servers running Microsoft exchange server to BPOS (Business Productivity Online) which is Microsoft’s hosted exchange service in cloud. Similarly i migrated in-house (dell) physical servers to racksapce cloud and dedicated hosting. My big server rack started disappearing and i started selling gigantic servers as a scrap. Following the similar trend, i migrated local CMS, WIKI, project management tool and almost every possible services to the rackspace hosted cloud. In the technology world, this move from physical servers to Rackspace dedicated hosting and rackspace cloud was named as migration to hybrid cloud. Personally 2012 seems like a stepping stones towards cloud.
Hybrid model was quite successful and stable but business requirement changed and we need a platform which need to be highly scalable and elastic in nature. This lead to the re-architecture or application as well as infrastructure. Racksapce no longer fulfilled our requirement and we moved to another cloud platform amazon web services (AWS) in 2013. The move was quite tricky due to legacy application written on various languages with different databases. It took a long time to finalize the base line amazon instances requirements but now we are in a stable position with a basic fixed set of aws instances with autoscaling and high availability configuration. Everything is going well but i am now worried with aws charges.
I started thinking that a huge amount will be spent on aws in a longer term if we are to host these instances for years. It is going to prove cheaper to buy physical servers. Now i can see many start-ups after being stabilized are moving towards a different approach of hosting application on colocation. Colocation is a hosting option for small businesses who want the features of a large IT department without the costs.
I am wondering whether 2014 is going to be the migration year for colocation.