In my previous post I argued that executives make the cloud cost assessment reports to suit their agenda.
My argument here is that the question – “what does it cost to run this application in the cloud” is in and of itself the wrong question to ask. It comes from a myopic vision of the cloud as another place to run applications. One needs to move away from the trees and look at the forest. i.e. look at the platform, the applications and the nimbleness required to adapt to the market.
Let’s start with the platform.
First, the cloud removes the traditional trade-off between availability and cost. A company does not need to buy additional hardware in anticipation of peak demand. Second, the cloud radically skews the traditional DevOps (development and operations) role in favour of more development by automating a lot of regular maintenance work.
At the level of applications, they are smaller, loosely coupled microservices which are more fail-tolerant and thereby increasing uptime. Secondly, new application deployment is much faster because developers can work on the same platform versions as in production
This results in a quicker transition from ideas to PoCs (proof of concept) followed by an accelerated path to production and quicker releases once in production. These are small improvements individually but combined together, they allow the company to grow the business exponentially.
A few years ago, the pharmaceutical company moderna built its mRNA research platform in the cloud. When Covid-19 hit the world, moderna was in a position to massively accelerate its vaccine development process.
The rest – as they say – is history.
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