Cloud Computing Uses

Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You may be investigating launching your new application in the cloud. Or you may have hundreds of apps running in your organization, and you may be tempted to move as many of them to the cloud as fast as possible. Since 2006, RightScale has advised thousands of organizations on which of their applications are right for public and private clouds. These are our rules of thumb.

Perfect for Public and Private Clouds

Three types of application workloads are ideal in a public or private cloud environment:

• Unpredictable growth: Applications that have unknown growth prospects, such as social games, new SaaS applications, and marketing campaigns, are perfect for the on-demand nature of cloud infrastructure.
• Cyclical: Applications with regular traffic fluctuations, such as daily financial market activity or seasonal e-commerce, benefit from auto-scaling to keep utilization high.
• Easily parallelized: Applications such as media encoding, batch processing, and big data analytics that can be scaled horizontally to more servers rather than vertically to large servers.

Example Use Cases

• Big Data Analytics - From fraud detection to statistical research, big data is everywhere. Explore how Hadoop and High Performance Computing clusters can be best deployed in public and private clouds.
• Development and Test - Develop and test applications in on-demand environments using consistently configured resources, lowering costs and shortening release cycles.
• Disaster Recovery - Public and private clouds enable cost-effective solutions to maintain highly available applications with resilient multi-datacenter and multi-provider architectures, minimizing downtime and data loss.
• Gaming Apps - Deliver flexible capacity to meet unpredictable traffic events and to lower costs for ongoing life cycle management using public and private clouds.
• Web and Mobile Apps - Deploy web and mobile applications that are highly scalable, highly available across a range of proven architectures, technologies, and clouds.

Better Off In a Private Cloud

While public clouds offer many advantages, several characteristics indicate that an application should be kept in a private cloud or a data center where you can control the hardware.

• High disk I/O and low latency: Some proprietary databases and applications require very high I/O and consistent throughput, particularly for replication and clustering. Most public clouds cannot guarantee this level of consistent low latency and performance.
• Legacy equipment: Applications that require specific proprietary or legacy equipment are not likely worth moving to a cloud environment.

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