Skytap’s CTO Brad Schick is fresh off a roadshow circuit, including a presentation at the recent OpenStack 2015 conference in Vancouver. In this talk, Brad frames the common adoption patterns for enterprises moving applications to cloud infrastructure.
There are several well-known strategies for embarking on public cloud initiatives, but the most successful ones seem to start by moving specific workloads to cloud, rather than a “forklift upgrade” of an entire architecture. This is why development and test activities are a natural first fit for public cloud infrastructure, along with greenfield apps that are purpose-built for containerization and cloud approaches.
The key pitfalls of enterprise cloud adoption occur when companies attempt to “punt” on leveraging cloud resources for a few years, or instead invest in private cloud resources exclusively. The payback benefits of “pay for what you use” aren’t available when you must invest in all the scale you need up front.
The growing OpenStack movement also matters a great deal to the enterprise cloud market of the future, as it allows businesses to avoid long-term dependency on vendor-specific platforms and protocols. Brad points out the characteristics of future-proof cloud applications in the OpenStack context in this session.
