Still Hesitant About Harnessing The Cloud? - Backblaze B2 Offers An Astonishingly Easy First Step To Leveraging The Cloud
For any IT professional or power user who has been reluctant to use the cloud, there are many compelling reasons to overcome that reluctance. In this article, I am going to share the top three reasons that led me to first use the cloud versus continuing to buy and build my own systems.
For those who are curious about trying the cloud, but concerned about the complexity and risks of the cloud, I believe Backblaze B2 offers a compelling set of features that make it a great starting place to enjoy the cloud’s benefits. I will outline these key benefits at the end.
----
My top three reasons for shifting some workloads to the cloud, rather than continuing to use hardware that we owned, were:
#1 The Cloud Offers Easy Reliability
I have been using the cloud for over a decade.? The first workloads that I moved to the cloud were driven by the business imperative of maintaining overall site uptime.
The website I was working with began its life running on hardware owned by our organization. When first launched, we just called it a server. Today we might call it "bare metal".? The primary challenges addressed by our moving to the cloud were improved connectivity, power and 24 hour support.
Today, these three advantages remain foundational benefits of the cloud value proposition. For connectivity, cloud vendors provide both high speed and redundant network connections. With my team’s initial move, just having redundant network connectivity out to the Internet justified the move. An added benefit was that the cloud data center also had power redundancy (including onsite electric generators that provided a final level of fallback in the event of extended power outages from the primary power utilities). Lastly the cloud vendor’s 24 hour support frequently proved invaluable. Our organization was small with our resources focused on building the technical infrastructure and running the business side. In our follow-the-sun world with a 24 hour business day, having on call a qualified technical team around the clock was a pure add and was invaluable on a number of occasions.
Big picture, larger more established competitors could build out and own all of the above, but for small and medium sized businesses and for individual power users, these reliability related features of the cloud remain invaluable.
One note, in my case before migrating our production workload from bare metal to the cloud we virtualized. Given the technology at that time we chose VMware. All compute cloud providers provide virtualization options.? We chose to use VMware because it gave us maximum portability.? In doing this, we gave up some of the features built into the cloud providers proprietary virtualization. However, for development and quality testing we still had versions of the code base and sample data hosted on our own servers. To have a uniform build across all three environments, we prioritized this portability.? Today, for many organizations, using containers provides similar portability benefits.
#2 Gain Strategic Advantage Leveraging The Cloud’s Instant On Capabilities
The "instant on" capabilities of the cloud offer a compelling value in a variety of ways.
In section #1 above, the cloud providers had all of their data center capabilities built out before we even opened our account with them. For us, this accelerated getting our services to our customers. As we all know, this can be vital to gain and maintain a competitive advantage in contested markets. And competitive advantages are invaluable for businesses of any size as well as for power users for their projects.
Another way that "instant on" capabilities plays out is how you pay. With the cloud there are no upfront cash outlays. The default payment model is pay-as-you go. It’s like renting or using metered utility services. It’s simple versus the complexity of building a full and complete data center infrastructure. I have built my fair share of data center infrastructure in my career. Timelines from inception to completion are always much longer when not leveraging the cloud. Outside of the cloud, the process includes building a budget, getting funding approval for large capital expenditures[1], staffing, ordering, taking delivery, installing, troubleshooting, and on and on. The cloud industry calls all of these build out steps "undifferentiated heavy lifting."
Every cloud company intimately knows these infrastructure build out and maintenance workflows. However, they are deemed undifferentiated because successfully building this basic infrastructure is just the minimum table stakes required to be in the game. The real value comes from how you use the infrastructure to deliver value to your customers. In most cases, the services you buy from cloud vendors are on par or better than what small or medium size businesses can build for themselves.
In business, I consistently find the biggest benefits in focusing on the hard problems of what makes my organization unique for our customers. It is a smarter choice to not dilute our focus away from our unique intellectual property by committing time and resources to building out infrastructure that will likely be only on par with what the public cloud vendors already provide.
Regarding “instant on” capability, in many cases organizations will find that getting new and better services to your customers is enabled by choosing cloud options. This offers a compelling value versus incurring time delays inherent in building out your own, self-managed infrastructure.
For more discussion regarding the trade-offs of making large upfront cash outlays of capital expenditures versus the possible advantages of the cloud’s pay-as-you go model, see "To Buy, Or Not to Buy? CapEx Versus OpEx is the Question".
In addition, for the first workload that I moved to the cloud, the utilization profile we had was deemed to be of a steady state. Yes, there were daily and seasonal variations but generally within a predictable range. One area where the cloud can be very compelling is for workloads that experience wide fluctuations. Many cloud vendors support scaling options that can be turned on as needed, and later turned off on the backside of the cycle when fluctuations subside. Given the cloud's pay-as-you go model, for spikey, highly variable workloads, the overall total costs can be dramatically lower versus the capital expenditure needed to build out upfront all the infrastructure required to support the peak load period.
#3 The Cloud Is A Key Component For Business Continuity Today
A critical necessity for organizations to survive long term is their ability to withstand and overcome adverse events. Technology infrastructure, which is vital to the lifeblood of modern organizations, are especially vulnerable to "adverse events" that come in many forms. One foundational requirement to surviving is having a solid business continuity plan. And a critical element to strong business continuity plans is having redundant copies of your data.
There is an art to working out how to make your data redundant. One important component to the art is having copies geographically separated. For some requirements, you will need the redundant copies of your data to be greater than 100 miles apart. This can be a challenge if you have to build out the infrastructure on your own. However, with the ubiquity of network connectivity, cloud storage is an easy way to snapshot data into a separate geographic location.? Public cloud vendors make this super easy by offering multiple regions with the click of a button.
For many companies, using cloud storage for backup snapshots of their redundant data is a surefire, low risk and high value way for taking their first step to being in the cloud. It fulfills an immediate requirement. It does it cost effectively. And it can be done with bounded costs. If you are just starting out in the cloud, I highly recommend creating offsite backups as your first step in harvesting the advantages of being in the cloud.
Given the general advantages of the cloud I highlighted above, I will next apply these points to Backblaze B2 specifically.
Backblaze B2 Offers A Compelling Opportunity To Take Your First Steps Into Using the Cloud
For your first steps into working in the cloud, I suggest you consider trying Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. I recommend this because I believe Backblaze B2 is one of the simplest, most straightforward and cost-effective options.
Backblaze B2 is one of the simplest options because Backblaze is a leading specialized cloud provider. As such, Backblaze is focused solely on cloud storage. This focus greatly simplifies the learning curve for you. This is very different versus other cloud providers who sometimes offer over 200 services and where the table stakes to even getting started on their platforms are much higher and time consuming.
Backblaze B2 is also one of the simplest options because Backblaze B2 has just a single price point for cloud storage (so no complex and confusing "tiers" of pricing), and no retention fees (as some other cloud providers have).
Backblaze B2 is straightforward because it is an easy-to-use service, including offering an S3 compatible API. Thus, there are a large number of integrations, tooling and documentation that are easily available for your use.
Also, Backblaze B2 offers some of the best performance in the industry on critical file upload speeds
Lastly, Backblaze B2 is highly cost effective for several reasons. As mentioned earlier, Backblaze B2 has just a single low price for cloud storage rather than having confusing “tiers” of pricing.? Backblaze B2’s storage costs are much less expensive than other cloud providers. For example, as of the writing of this blog post, Backblaze B2's storage costs are 1/5th of AWS’s S3 Standard. In addition, for download costs Backblaze B2 customers receive 3X free “egress”.? So all customers with 10TB stored, receive 30TB free egress monthly. Importantly, Backblaze always charges $0 for inbound, upload network traffic. Beyond the 3X free “egress”, Backblaze B2's download costs are 1/9th of all AWS S3 tiers (and free when using select Backblaze B2 partners, see more details below). Importantly, Backblaze also offers Universal Data Migration where Backblaze’s system engineers migrate your qualifying data and files into Backblaze B2 from wherever they are at no cost to you. These can yield tremendous immediate and long-term savings for you.
Having highlighted why I think Backblaze B2 can be a compelling option for taking your first steps in leveraging the power of the cloud, I will finish by reviewing Backblaze B2 in the context of the three reasons that first led me to use the cloud.
领英推荐
#1 Backblaze Offers Easy Reliability
Backblaze B2 is built to the industry's highest level of storage fault tolerance and durability. Backblaze has been safely, securely and reliably storing customers’ data on our cloud storage architecture since 2008.
When you write your data to Backblaze B2, our system writes your data on a "logical partition" on top of twenty separate hard drives (selected out of a current total of nearlyover ? million hard drives that we currently have in service). Thus, your data is stored redundantly in shards across 20 different drives. When any individual hard drive fails, this architecture is fault tolerant, so all reads of your data are still 100%. And no customer data is lost.
The team at Backblaze, as a leader in cloud storage, are world-class experts. Our Backblaze "Drive Stats" are frequently cited by other major companies. "Drive Stats", which we have published quarterly since 2013, are operational data on every hard drive spinning in all of our data centers for that quarter.
As a world-class cloud company, Backblaze data centers are built and operated to the highest standards, including having both redundant network connections and power redundancy. Further, they are staffed around the clock 24/7/365 by our world-class data center personnel. All this is done to ensure that your data is stored safely, securely and reliably, and that your data can be accessed whenever you need it.
Another important feature of Backblaze B2 is freedom from any "disk full" errors! The Backblaze B2 service team works continuously to ensure there is always ample free disk space including constantly adding additional capacity, so that when your application needs to write data it succeeds.
Backblaze B2 also has a rich set of optional built-in features for maintaining file versions, replication between regions, object lock for ransomware and deletion protection, and lifecycle rules.
Some customers are concerned about the variable, pay-as-you-go payment model of cloud services. A novel (and for some customers critically important) capability of Backblaze B2 is billing reliability and predictability.
Backblaze offers customers two levels of safety from the risk of unanticipated cloud bill overcharges:? free egress and hard-stop guardrail options.??
The primary two charges incurred for cloud storage are amount of storage and egress.??
Amount of storage is a straight calculation of how many terabytes or petabytes you have stored. Egress are network charges for every download outbound terabyte or petabyte that are read every month. For customers hosting bandwidth hungry sites, egress costs often exceed storage costs.? However with Backblaze B2 customers receive 3X free egress. So all customers with 10TB stored, receive 30TB free egress monthly. Importantly, Backblaze always charges $0 for inbound, upload network traffic. Further, regarding egress, Backblaze has free egress partnerships with many other cloud companies that specialize in compute and content delivery. So when customers choose Backblaze and these free egress partners, they are 100% free of any egress charges from Backblaze when their data is read off of Backblaze B2 and downloaded out to these free egress partners.?
The second level of safety that Backblaze customers enjoy from the risk of unanticipated cloud bill overcharges stem from Backblaze offering two hard-stop guardrail options:? B2 Reserve and Data Caps. These can be ideal for organizations with predictable storage requirements. B2 Reserve is a fixed price option for predefined amounts of storage capacity and download bandwidth. Data Caps can be added to any account to ensure that customer configurable dollar amounts are not exceeded. Many large organizations rely on the FinOps framework for early identification of overspending anomalies. Backblaze B2's ?Reserve Capacity and Data Caps prevent overspending anomalies from ever happening. (But note that these features are best for predictable, steady-state storage requirements.)
Shockingly high-cost overruns need not be a risk with Backblaze B2. Predictable billing for small and medium size businesses and individual power users can make a huge difference in managing your costs.
#2 Backblaze’s Instant On Capabilities Help To Gain Strategic Advantage
Backblaze B2 is prebuilt. You can just create an account in seconds and immediately start uploading files. There is no upfront cost and no lock-ins with Backblaze B2.? In addition, Backblaze B2 always has ample free space for your applications to write data for whatever your workload requirements demand.
Over time, Backblaze B2 customers automatically benefit from hardware maintenance and upgrade decisions made by the Backblaze B2 service team.? Again, you focus on your customers and our world-class service team ensures your data storage system remains state-of-the-art including adding desirable new features over time. This is another important element for customer ease-of-use.
One important feature of Backblaze B2 is that every file stored on Backblaze B2 has a uniquely addressable HTTP URL. This is especially helpful for public file hosting, because as soon as the file is stored on Backblaze B2 it can immediately be read by your customers via HTTP, such as by web browsers and mobile apps. This is different than disk storage outside of the cloud which often also requires the addition of web servers to deliver files.
If you are interested in trying out Backblaze B2 and doing your own proof of concept, you just sign up. There are no hassles and no fuss. For all accounts, the first 10 GB are free. No credit card is required until you want to store over the 10 GB amount.
#3 Backblaze B2 Helps Deliver Better Business Continuity Today
As mentioned earlier, a key to any business continuity plan is having redundant copies of data geographically separated. Wherever you have Internet connections, your data can be quickly and easily copied to Backblaze B2.
Backblaze B2’s object lock feature offers an advanced level of protection for business continuity requirements.? Network storage, of course, is not “air gapped.” However, setting a user configurable object lock defines a duration of time that the data will be immutable. Meaning it cannot be deleted, creating a virtual air gap to your data, which effectively thwarts any ransomware incursions.
Backblaze B2 is integrated directly into many data storage and backup software products making it as easy as setting a configuration setting to get a redundant copy of your data copied reliably out to Backblaze B2. Integration partners include network attached storage systems from Synology, QNAP and others, as well as backup software from Veeam, MSP360 and others.
Several Backblaze customers achieve business continuity goals using Backblaze B2 in both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures to make data redundant between clouds. Backblaze B2 is multi and hybrid cloud friendly.
Within the Backblaze environment, another important feature that Backblaze B2 has built-in is Cloud Replication. With replication Backblaze customers can automatically store data to different locations—across regions, across accounts, or in different buckets within the same account. When using Backblaze Cloud Replication there are no additional fees, including no data transfer fees for making the copy.
Again, I want to highlight that Backblaze B2's Reserve Capacity and Data Caps can also prevent overspending anomalies from ever happening.
_____
So there you have it. If you have never used the cloud, I think there are many compelling reasons to give the cloud a try. If you want to move forward using the cloud, do consider giving Backblaze B2 a try. After my having worked at another cloud pioneer for many years, I can recommend Backblaze B2 highly for those starting out using the cloud.
And if you are already using the cloud, please share the reasons that motivated your move to the cloud in the comments below.??
Hashtags:? #cloud #saas #finops #cloudstorage #s3?
[1] Which for startups includes investor fund raising.