How the Cloud Can Help Scale Your Business

Infrastructure planning is the kind of topic to put people to sleep, but ignore it at your peril. 

What is The Cloud?

There’s still a lot of confusion about “The Cloud” which I completely understand. 

The first thing to understand is the cloud is a collection of computers (servers) that are all linked together to form one big cluster of resources. This cluster can be sliced up into any size piece. 

For example:

If you want something small ( to run a few websites) you can buy 1vCPU and 2Gb of RAM. 

Or if you want to run a very busy e-commerce site, you could buy 8vCPU and 64Gb of RAM.

I’m not going to go too much into what the cloud is and how it works, but just accept there’s a big cluster (or cloud) of machines all linked together. 

The key point to understand is: You can ask for bigger and smaller pieces of the cloud as you need them.

How does that help my business?

Recently I saw a business that had moved all its infrastructure from in-house into a data centre. They have 15+ servers to run a busy e-commerce solution. This business was very seasonal, meaning they did about 70% of their business from September to January, whilst being relatively quiet the rest of the year.  

Moving into a data-centre was a step in the right direction, but they missed a fabulous opportunity to introduce stability and most importantly scalability into their infrastructure. 

For 8 months of the year they were running expensive, over-specified hardware. This was set in stone, and the servers were sitting there mostly idle from Feb to Aug. 

What could they have done differently?

They key thing they should have addressed was the idle hardware, which is the mark of bad infrastructure planning when dealing with larger solutions. On Black Friday their systems were screaming for mercy, but the rest of the year they were massively over specified.

I would have suggested they opt for cloud instances that were able to scale up and down as necessary. For example:

Busy period (Sept – Jan)

• 3 x Web Servers (4 vCPU, 8Gb RAM)
• 2 x Database Servers (one master, one slave)

 Black Friday

• 5 x Web Servers (4 vCPU, 8Gb RAM)
• 3 x Database Servers (one master, two slave)

Quiet Period (Feb – Aug)

• 1 x Web Servers (4 vCPU, 8Gb RAM)
• 1 x Database Server (master only)

Why would that help?

Cost Savings

My solution would almost certainly have been cheaper. Even if it wasn’t, you’re not spending money on hardware to sit there doing nothing in your quiet period. Spend the money where/when it’s needed most. 

Month on month savings for the quiet period could pay for the increased costs in the busy period. 

Stability

When solutions are bottle necked, your systems are slow, your customers are irritated and you have the following problems. 

• Oversells – When sales are stuck awaiting import, you’re potentially overselling. Sound fun? No, I thought not.
• Clean Up Operations – If you’ve got customers who didn’t get emails, order confirmations etc, your customer service team spend the next few days/weeks taking a verbal battering from your customers.
• Lost Sales – The most important one. When it’s busy and deals are limited, your customers will just go elsewhere because your website was down. 

Expandability

Adding additional resources is easy. When you can go from 1 to 2 servers, adding into more servers is easy. 

Should I move to the cloud?

If your website is slow, or you think you’re losing sales because people can’t get on your website, it could be an option. 

Why not contact us, and we can have a chat about it.