Choosing a Cloud Provider
When it comes to selecting who you’ll be working with as a cloud provider (assuming you will be), what are the different components you’ll be looking for, and how will you evaluate them? For those that have been following along, we moved quite a bit of the infrastructure for SSWUG to the cloud and learned some killer lessons along the way.
We learned, in a very distinctive and blunt way, how NOT to configure things, for example. We also learned what types of services are truly key, and which are less important. We also have come to understand how immature documentation is at this point. While there is lots of help available, that help is very silo’d and tough to combine for a complete picture and plan.
Many people I’ve talked with still see the cloud as something of a question mark when it comes to considering it, and the options it provides, for use in the corporate world. If you are, or have, gone through this process, what types of questions did you find most important and helpful? Here are a few things that have become clear:
– How are the virtual machines managed and what happens on reboots and restarts of the machines in terms of IP addresses, machine names and configurations? While this may seem quite specific, it’s a key piece of understanding the lifecycle of your servers and how it’s managed.
– What access control options do you have? Profiles, firewalls, VPNs – they all provide key access points to your systems and you need to understand the control options you have.
– When there is a problem, what’s the support infrastructure like? What do you do to escalate an issue?
More to come, but this gets you started. What do you suggest? What questions do you ask? What experiences have you had in moving some or all of your work to the cloud?
Let me know…