Just put it on public cloud right?

If I had a penny for every time someone came to me and said “I need public cloud”, I could probably afford to buy a reassuringly priced artisan coffee in one of those boutique coffee shops every day for the rest of my life. These conversations inevitably go one of two ways; they buy cloud regardless of their needs, or, we discuss their requirements collaboratively and architect the correct solution, which could be, as they initially stated, a public cloud solution.

Why am I bringing this up? The reality is that most companies selling solutions have the best intentions at heart, but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions! I feel that the default answer when I speak to certain providers is whatever solution they are touting at the time, as opposed to taking a consultative approach.

All my consultations are free, I don’t charge clients for information. Whilst time is the most valuable commodity in life, helping clients achieve the right solution is often more financially valuable than any consultation fee I could apply. In reality, a client that is utilising the correct solution will happily renew and re-contract services and continue to follow a consultative approach by working with a provider but it takes a leap of faith on both sides.

So when is public cloud not always the best choice? Normally storage, it is when you need large volumes of resilient rapid storage that can be accessed at all times or any variation on the above. Once public cloud is built, provisioning services is simple, as such I can forgive people for having a "one size fits all" approach, however, if we look at storage on major public cloud providers then we start to see that whilst prices seem reasonable, the costs soon add up and become overwhelming quite rapidly. Let me tell you, there is something to be said for a bunch of large disks and allowing them to be consumed by a software solution such as TrueNAS which is managed by an MSP that can handle the daily administration. For solutions that require 32TB+ of disk space, we see significant savings, in addition, we are not limited to just SATA obviously, we can use SSD or NVMe should we so wish.

But this needs to connect to my virtual machines, how does that work? Quite simply actually, the solution supports various protocols, including iSCSI which would help you connect to that space. 

But this is slow access, right? Not necessarily, naturally, your data is going to be transferred over the network, but that's true with all distributed storage public cloud. Switching fabric has sufficiently advanced enough over the years where 25Gbps is relatively standard in our solutions, many opt for 100Gbps. Nevertheless, this is not a valid solution for all parties - As such, we adopt a consultative approach to all our client solutions.

For many clients public cloud is the right solution, however, it can be cost-prohibitive to just "put everything on public cloud" and this is where Coreix consultancy services come in - We can help you find the right solution for the problem you have!