One of the greatest values of the cloud is the ability to pay for what you use as you use it. The cloud model of infrastructure really freed teams from long, expensive planning cycles wherein they try to estimate how much physical computing hardware they will have to buy before they can run their workload. With a cloud, you just get started today and pay as you go.
Did You Buy Enough Hardware?
Historically, teams had to purchase physical computing infrastructure before they could deploy their workloads. They had to spend a significant amount of time and resources up front estimating and determining how much memory, CPU, storage, and networking resources they were going to need before they even started doing any work or serving their customers’ needs. There simply was not any other way to deploy your workloads.
You had to take special care when making these determinations because if you order more physical hardware than you need you waste money on unused resources; however, if you do not order enough to meet your demand, your customers or end users are going to have a really poor experience because your physical resources cannot meet their needs. Teams could easily spend months or years planning out their physical infrastructure to make sure they have everything right.
Even if you guess correctly and buy the amount of hardware you actually need, you are now locked into that hardware investment for the long term. This means that if you see a decrease in your demand for physical computing resources, you still have to pay for those resources. In addition, if you think you need more resources, you have to start this whole cycle of estimation, guessing, and ordering over again to judge how much more capacity you need to meet your customers’ growing demands.
Overall, managing physical resource capacity was time-consuming and expensive. Businesses and teams had a difficult time responding to changes in the market when they needed 6 month, 12 month, or longer lead cycles for changing their physical infrastructure.
Why Buy When You Can Rent?
One of the biggest innovations of the cloud is the ability to buy or discard computing resources on demand at little or no notice. Teams now could rapidly request as much or as little CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources as they needed. Teams that use the cloud no longer have to take so much time carefully planning out what computing resources they have to purchase because there is no long term investment required on cloud platforms. You could simply rent what you need and leave the physical hardware to the cloud provider to manage.
The pay-as-you-go model has been a great fit for small teams and individual developers who have a great idea for software but lack the resources bigger companies have for purchasing computing resources.
Paying as you go is also great for bigger and smaller teams who may need to temporarily increase their computing resources, such as to meet a sudden surge in demand or a seasonal increase in usage. These teams can easily buy more capacity without having to make an expensive long term investment that goes unused the rest of the year.
The Cloud Means Flexibility
The cloud is great for giving teams resources that can meet their needs at any time, usually without any need to wait for someone to allocate more resources. Teams can setup however much or little infrastructure they need for as long as they need without a commitment. All they pay for is what they use.