The impact of cloud computing on O’Reilly’s 2008 Art of Capacity Planning has shifted quite a bit to say the least. Its still a great resource and well worth the read for any web administrator, manager or director.
My interest in revisiting is remembering Chapter 4: Predicting Trends. This touches two important factors today: cloud and procurement.
While in 2008 it was possible to ramp up a cloud, today a very high capacity cloud can be deployed in less than 10 minutes.
At the time of the book’s publication (2008) AWS pricing looked competitive. Yet today those prices are considered somewhat excessively high.
The Art of Capacity Planning now is all looking at cloud solutions by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure has kept Amazon’s EC2 busy in releasing new services and even more aggressive pricing models. Under AWS users get free access to CentOS, LAMP stack, Git and WordPress.
But the Art of Capacity Planning touches on the very important component of Procurement. Procurement and Cloud contract solutions taught by UCLA has been very beneficial to my cloud projects.
My own contributions to migrate a commercial CommonSpot CMS on legacy hardware to a WordPress driven cloud CMS were directly impacted by my knowledge from UCLA. The use of compacts made the decision for the University a sound yet quick decision. The role of the Procurement officer and the guidelines to achieve the right cloud option for an institution defined in The Art of Capacity Planning are proven in the real world.
The role of Procurement cannot be overstated. A good relationship with your Procurement office can result in rapid development for any organization or higher education institution looking to migrate expensive legacy enterprise applications from a campus data center server into a robust cloud app that can meet the demands of today’s college campus.
Budget cuts have been creeping into campus data centers. Today with aggressive cloud compacts, Amazon-quality security and uptime and backup services are proving that capacity planning will benefit almost every college from large public to small private schools.