We have had a large assortment of learnings from the move to fully-hosted services. Yesterday’s post talked about these a litlle, and I wanted to expand on that a bit with some additional things that have gone really well in our transition.
Better Accessibility to Updates
Perhaps one of the most evident changes as we’ve moved to a more managed and hosted environment has been the ability to better manage updates and upgrades to hardware and software. We’re a small business, of course, so managing costs means making every server dollar and software expense stretch as far as possible. This has traditionally meant holding on to those old versions of SQL Server and Windows and all of those pieces and parts as long as possible.
Now, with our updated environment, we’re able to move more quickly on updates. We can spin up servers to test, move more quickly and confidently and have fall-back positions if things experience issues. We’ve worked hard every step of the way too to try to re-consider how we do things – what’s new, what needs thought on how it applies, are we doing things the right ways with the right technologies? All of these come into play, and they’re economically feasible because of options. Options to test, options to fire up a small instance and see what happens.
Opportunity to Optimize
Optimization is something that we’re always trying to do – and by offering the ability to move pieces around, update a server or service here, leave one on a smaller instance there – all of these combine to give us the ability to pay close attention to what’s needed. The start to the surprise in all of this has been that we can keep our costs fairly consistent (more on this in the coming days) and still improve the overall experience by tweaking the resources associated with specific tasks.
Was this possible without the cloud? You bet. But the economics of turning things on and off as needed, of tweaking the assigned resources and all of that has made it reasonable and economical for the most part.
Surprise: More Awareness of Moving Parts
The surprise, to me, was learning about all of the different pieces that we really did need to pay attention to on a specific, targeted basis. When we were building on more limited hardware and where we were pulling forward code bases that had lived for 10+ years, things were pretty stuck in their ways. When it came time to dig around in the bill though, and pick apart the technology configuration and options that were part of all of this, we quickly became aware that we had much more work to be done on the moving parts and on tuning for those parts.
This has made a huge change in our ability to serve up what people ask for, and our ability to respond as things change, while making sure we’ve increased security, control, recoverability and more many fold.
Initially, this was brought on by budget reviews after starting the move. But once we got the hang of it, it was easy to see the leverage and opportunities we had to throw away prior approaches where needed and be much more able to step ahead with new tools and technologies on a piece-by-piece basis.