Do Current Clouds Resolve Your Problems?

This page describe some of the issues you might encounter if your use clouds to fullfil your requirements for your solution.

High CDN Cost = Content Delivery

CDN's cost between 20 and 60 on major CDN's from Amazon, Google, ..., after negotiation and willingness to park lots of money and commit per month it mught be certain discount.
Other specialized CDN's can be around 10 per TB if services from e.g. Europe or US, smaller CDN's are much more expensive.
Managing these CDN's is expensive and not an easy job.

This means to service 10m people, it would cost about 1 to 2m USD per month just for CDN alone.

High Cost of Operations

There are high cost of operations attributed to this type of technology.

Cloud servers
- Managing those servers
- What if mistakes are made

Ability to Shut Down Servers

There is always the possibility to be shut down on the public cloud

It's highly probable that within months there would be attempts to shut down the CDN's or often it happens more softly (give bad service and make your product look bad).

Can't Scale Apps

Apps are typically not ready to scale.

There are optimizations which can be done e.g. better indexing, better queries, more optimization strategies e.g. using redis
More knowledge is required to optimize the app

Ability to Shutdown the Mobile Apps

Google/Apple might chose to shutdown apps
Not easy to know how fast this will go, it might just be overnight

The GDPR constraints are to be taken into account. They are very annoying constraints in e.g. Europe, need to be careful to comply.

Legal Potential Trouble

It's important to have good Terms & Conditions (T&C) and think which legal entity will be the counterpart of the T&C
There will be legal requirements, e.g. shutdown and/or recognize bad content

Redundancy and Uptime

There are a factor of parameters that need to be taken into account to provide a reliable service.

Is the site redundant, can data be lost?
What happens if a datacenter goes down?
- Or what happens if a DB server crashes?
What happens if e.g. DB gets corrupted?
How to make sure people always deserve the service they need
If it kind of works now, will it work if 10x more people?
Is everything monitored?
If an issue is detected are there people available 24h/day 7/7 to fix
Do the people who will fix have the right knowledge, where is that knowledge stored
Is the monitoring system itself monitored, very often monitoring by itself will stop working

Performance

Performance affect user experience directly and must be dealt with care.

How to see performance is not good enough for customers
How to make sure we can easily fix it, can be region specific
How to relocate services?

Protect Against Human Error

The system in place must be able to protect against human error. This has to be considered.

Mistakes are and will be made this might have huge impact on uptime and if not careful loose data
Truck factor: what happens if someone goes away? Can org easily take over and continue
Level of automation & documentation?
How is version control done

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