In this episode of Cloud Frontier, Rob Pankow interviews Elias Schneider, founder of Codesphere, about his journey and the evolution of developer platforms at scale. With a background at Google, Elias brings deep expertise in cloud-native development processes. They discuss the challenges of building large-scale developer platforms and why enterprise customers are crucial for scaling such solutions

This interview is part of the simplyblock Cloud Frontier Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, and our show site.

Key Takeaways

Q: What are the current trends in cloud migration and infrastructure management?

One major trend is the shift back to on-premise infrastructure from the cloud, driven by rising cloud costs and increased control requirements. Many enterprises are adopting a hybrid approach, keeping some workloads on-prem while utilizing cloud services for scaling and fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to balance cost and performance while managing regulatory concerns.

Q: Why is it important to use managed services in cloud environments?

Managed services in cloud environments allow companies to offload the complexity of infrastructure management. This includes automatic updates, monitoring, and scaling, which reduces the need for dedicated personnel and ensures the infrastructure runs efficiently. Without managed services, companies face increased operational overhead and risk of downtime.

In addition to highlighting the key takeaways, it’s essential to provide context that enriches the listener’s understanding of the episode. By offering this added layer of information, we ensure that when you tune in, you’ll have a clearer grasp of the nuances behind the discussion. This approach helps shed light on the reasoning and perspective behind the thoughtful questions posed by our host, Rob Pankow. Ultimately, this allows for a more immersive and insightful listening experience.

Key Learnings

Q: What are the benefits of developers managing their own cloud environments?

Allowing developers to manage their own cloud environments enables faster iterations and more autonomy. It eliminates the need for constant back-and-forth with DevOps teams, which can slow down development. Developers can directly deploy, test, and scale applications, which leads to more agile development cycles.

Simplyblock Insight: When developers have control over their own environments, the development cycle speeds up significantly. Simplyblock’s orchestration tools simplify the deployment and management process, enabling developers to maintain performance and scalability while reducing the overhead typically associated with infrastructure management.

Q: What are the main challenges companies face with cloud scalability?

One major challenge with cloud scalability is managing the complexity of infrastructure as the number of services and applications grows. Many companies struggle with orchestrating resources efficiently, leading to cost overruns and increased downtime. Additionally, scaling globally while maintaining performance and compliance can be difficult without the right tools.

Simplyblock Insight: Ensuring optimal performance while scaling requires intelligent automation and resource orchestration. Simplyblock helps companies optimize storage and performance across distributed environments, automating resource allocation to reduce costs and prevent performance bottlenecks as businesses scale.

Q: What role does infrastructure sovereignty play in cloud adoption?

Infrastructure sovereignty refers to the ability of a company to maintain control over its infrastructure, especially when operating across public and private clouds. This is particularly important for enterprises facing regulatory constraints or data sovereignty laws that require specific handling of sensitive information.

Simplyblock Insight: With hybrid cloud setups becoming more common, maintaining control over where and how data is stored is crucial. Simplyblock offers solutions that allow businesses to manage data across multiple infrastructures, ensuring compliance with data regulations while optimizing performance and cost-efficiency.

Additional Nugget of Information

Q: Why are hybrid cloud solutions becoming more popular?

As companies scale their cloud operations, hybrid cloud solutions are becoming increasingly popular. A hybrid approach allows businesses to combine the benefits of on-premise infrastructure with cloud services, offering more flexibility, better cost management, and the ability to meet regulatory requirements. This approach enables companies to maintain control over critical workloads while benefiting from the scalability of the cloud.

Conclusion

In this episode, Elias Schneider shares his journey from Google to founding Codesphere, emphasizing the importance of addressing the needs of large enterprises. Codesphere helps companies standardize their development processes, enabling faster deployments and reducing costs. As you think about your company’s cloud strategy, consider how platforms like Codesphere can offer scalability, sovereignty, and streamlined processes.

If you’re in the process of scaling your development or infrastructure, now is the time to explore solutions that empower your developers and improve operational efficiency. Whether you are considering hybrid cloud solutions or simply aiming to enhance your development workflows, the insights from this episode provide valuable guidance.

If you’re eager to learn more about founding early-stage cloud infrastructure startups, entrepreneurship, or taking visionary ideas to market, be sure to tune in to future episodes of the Cloud Frontier Podcast.

Stay updated with expert insights that can help shape the next generation of cloud infrastructure innovations!

The post Developer Platforms at Scale | Elias Schneider appeared first on simplyblock.

We have collected some real-world usage data from e-commerce and retails companies and found out that while customers use a large variety of different IaaS and PaaS services in the cloud, a large chunk of the actual cloud costs often go into just a few, rather basic, but very resource-intensive services. These are perfect candidates for offloading from the cloud.

A good example are relational open-source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Looking both into the cloud bills of scale-ups and at the workloads of long-standing enterprises, it becomes clear that relational databases make up a significant part of overall IT infrastructure resource consumption (and IaaS/PaaS cloud costs). In our analysis, we first looked at the distribution of average cost across AWS services of two medium-sized e-commerce companies. The cost of the cloud database service makes up 46% of their total cloud bill, with 10% for RDS storage and 36% for RDS instances:

We then looked at the consumption patterns of customers based on their mix of both reserved and on-demand instances. We further analyzed the daily, weekly and monthly usage patterns and performed a cost comparison based on a model, which provides sufficient resources (ram, cpu, network bandwidth, storage capacity and IOPS) to cover peak demand with a safety reserve on top. We prepared a model considering the total cost of ownership for running the databases on premises in a data center in relatively close distance to the AWS availability zone and providing close integration. In addition, the scenario includes a usage of the AWS availability zone as the site for database backups and disaster recovery.

The cost distribution of the new private-cloud database service, which replaced the RDS service looks as follows:

Co-location and external network costs include the racks, power, data-center networking ports across racks and management VPN. Equipment includes servers, separate storage nodes and networking switches. We assume a hardware depreciation period of 5 years and an average annual cost of capital of 6%. Backup storage is not included as it remains purely cloud-based.

Software subscriptions include subscriptions for Ubuntu with openstack, grafana (monitoring) and puppet enterprise (configuration management).

AWS storage includes performance block storage on EC2 level and backup storage. It is required for cross-site backup and disaster recovery. The replicated storage also serves as a hub for outbound data to all subsequent systems, which still reside in the cloud.

The cost of an external management and operations service for the private cloud stack would add an extra 50% on top of the reduced database cost, however the substantial cost savings of 80% on cloud-based database costs compared to AWS RDS make the overall savings still significant, as presented below.

As it becomes apparent, due to the big chunk of costs of relational databases as part of the overall IaaS/PaaS costs, savings of more than 35% on overall IaaS/PaaS costs could be achieved in this scenario.

In conclusion, adopting a hybrid cloud operating model can bring significant benefits to businesses by combining the best of both worlds – flexibility, fast time-to-market, affordable resilience, and access to a wide range of platform services, while also ensuring cost-efficient operations and maximum privacy for sensitive data.

The post Reducing cloud costs by 30%: a case study on relational databases with hybrid cloud appeared first on simplyblock.