Why Simple Solutions are Better for the Cloud

I came across this article from TechCrunch How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger and it reminded me of one thing I have been evangelizing about cloud and IT overall is that simple solutions with less parts are better. Here is Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger saying “The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible,” this he states, is the goal. We look forward to seeing how that evolves with Instagram’s latest endeavour with FaceBook.

So, how does this relate to cloud? Several ways! First, when you are on top of an IaaS platform and with a managed hosting provider, you can concentrate on securing and deploying your application and let the experts work on patches and upgrades. The cloud offers dedicated staff ensuring security for a specified group of equipment, thus making it more efficient with less mistakes.  I have debated before the fact that these security experts within a managed hosting environment make the cloud a more secure environment than a physical one.  Also, I have previously discussed how to choose a cloud provider, to examine its security policy in order to make sure that your data is secure and always available. Keep an eye on best practices for security assurance within cloud computing, which can be found at organizations such as The Cloud Security Alliance.

Secondly, what is happening now in cloud is that instead of many different hardware and software providers, enterprise cloud providers are selecting one or two. This way, all of the hardware and software is easily managed because it involves a select number of known vendors with experts supporting just that subset of systems. Less parts equals less errors. Nowadays, there are several solutions that enterprise cloud providers could offer: managing services that include monitoring and security, configuring the cloud environment according to company’s needs and so on.

As you migrate more of your infrastructure into the cloud, the simpler the environment becomes. So for example if you place the infrastructure in the same protected data center and environment, there is no need for secure tunnels from one data center to another.  This lowers latency and decreases number of configurations, making it again simpler.

The need for greater simplicity is a true cloud imperative. Seeing how simple cloud solutions will be in the future is just a matter of time.

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/970306.