Cloud cost is rising. Or is it? What is still within the realm of control for organizations, and what is impending and unavoidable? CXposé.tech summarizes the migration option, and while at it throws in the possibility of modernization 

The industry reaction to Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware reflected a mix of opportunity and concern. The latter’s strong position in virtualization and its partnerships with major cloud providers make it attractive to Broadcom as cloud continues to evolve and adoption continues to grow.

One recent outcome from the acquisition which was finalized in late 2023 was that users would have to switch from perpetual licensing to more expensive subscription-based licensing. “This means a lot of licensing costs are going to hit you very soon, depending on your contract with the vendor,” one migration expert from a global hyperscaler had pointed out recently.

“It’s a journey. It takes time to get there. And we always start simple.”

So, during VMware’s annual flagship event this year, everyone was all ears when Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered his keynote.While the different news outlets perceived, and reported the announcements differently, they had picked up on the common themes – admissions of having under-delivered on the private cloud stack, a focus that has shifted from multi, public cloud to private cloud, and IT departments that have suffered PTSD due to public cloud.

To be more exact, Hock Tan had said, “The future of the enterprise is private.”

Virtualization and public cloud

Many enterprises use VMware’s virtualization technology to build private clouds, or as part of hybrid cloud solutions. So, increased licensing costs have directly increased the cost of operating these private and hybrid cloud environments.

Organizations looking for alternatives have landed upon Nutanix, and especially the open source standard for cloud infrastructure, Open Stack, which over the years has matured immensely to enterprise-ready levels.

But, what about public clouds? These can be viable options, if they become comparably more cost-effective, right?

Let’s say you want the public cloud

Not long after announcing its Malaysia region, Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated with Exabytes on a full-day Business Connect Series event. AWS’ business development leader for Migration, Dhirag Garg’s presentation stood out in particular because it addressed the topic of modernization of apps, platforms, and cloud, overall.

Bird migration

This was top of mind for most of the event participants especially if they have some VMware footprint – could public cloud replace, or address to some extent the rising cost from VMware’s licensing fees?

Dhiraj pointed out that it is very easy to bring VMware workloads to the AWS cloud, and that organizations that do so also have the option to self-manage it, run it in containers, run it serverless, or run it with AWS managing it.

Naturally, having it on the AWS cloud would offer a seamless experience which Dhiraj described as being “pretty much the way you’re running it today.”

To make it more compelling, existing VMware functionalities had alternatives in AWS, for example AWS Console would be replaced by EC2, and so on.

Addressing monolithic apps while you are at it

AWS’s Dhiraj made it very clear from the get-go. Their end goal for every customer is to have them running cloud native services, without virtual machines or servers. “It’s a journey. It takes time to get there. And we always start simple.”

Dhiraj Garg

According to Dhiraj, modernization is crucial to get the best value from the cloud, and the complex migration process kicks off with an assessment phase to estimate targets to aim for and TCOs.

“We believe migrations are complex, and if they are complex, there is a possibility of costs getting increased,” he said, adding that the reason why AWS invests in their customer’s journey is to ensure that nothing stops them migrating.

Monolithic apps have traditionally required a server within which resides the resources required for apps to work – compute, storage, networking. “The entire server which is running the application, because it is a structure, it has database, the application, the middleware, and so on. It does everything. But, if it goes down, everything goes down.”

“It just doesn’t make sense to run that way anymore,’ Dhiraj pointed out, proposing instead that organized applications have tasks broken down into microservices, and each microservice is designed to only one thing at a time.

This is a model which he described also as super agile, very, very resource efficient, and very fundamental.

“So, this on a higher level is what modernization means.”

According to Dhiraj, there are thousands and thousands of microservices that make up one big function that is usually executed by an application.

“There is huge scalability to handle workloads as it increases, and if a microservice goes down, it simply spins up another one to get into that workload.”

Don’t lift and shift

This is why an expert close to the workings of applications, clouds, and data centers, advised, “Don’t lift and shift (workloads) going to the cloud.”

AWS has the lift and shift option for organizations who require it, but it also offers an acceleration program for businesses who opt for the modernization route. This involves refactoring their apps, and replatforming with the end goal of achieving native cloud state.

Apps have to be refactored because cloud-optimized apps developed specifically for cloud will have lower costs than apps that have been developed to run on servers.

“There is huge scalability to handle workloads as it increases, and if a microservice goes down, it simply spins up another one to get into that workload.”

The anonymous expert shared his experience of his GLC organization moving everything to the cloud in 2019. “This happened a lot during the pandemic and we managed to stay within our IT budget.”

He cautioned, “You need to evaluate on a case by case basis, what would make sense on-premises and on the cloud.”

Besides that he recommended having finance people who are well-versed in identifying cloud costs and inefficiencies. “You also need tech people who know how to turn off the lights when not in use.

“The painful part of it all? Throwing away old dapps and redeveloping new ones specifically for use in the cloud. But, in the end it is worth it.”

Malik Murad Ali

Malik Murad Ali, IT Director at Mydin Malaysia, a local homegrown retail chain, gives a contrarian view by sharing that running general operations in the cloud including data transmission is about 1.5 to 2 times more than running it on-premises or in a co-lo environment.

“Currently, my data center is in co-lo with a local sovereign cloud for backup and disaster recovery. The cost is two times less than having it on one of the public clouds ie. Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform,” he concluded.