Business benefits of Cloud Architectures 

This blog post is about some of the clear business benefits of building applications using Cloud Architecture.

If someone wants to build a large scale system it may cost a lot. He needs to invest for hardware such as machines, routers, backup power supplies etc and also for hardware management like power management and cooling. By moving to cloud we can have almost zero upfront infrastructure investment with no fixed cost or startup cost.

If you choose to develop your applications in the cloud you can have just in time infrastructure. If not, even though your business become famous your infrastructure may not scale and you become a victim of your own success. On the other hand if you invested heavily and if you couldn’t become famous then also you will fail. If you are deploying applications in the cloud you should not worry about pre-procuring of large scale systems. The solution has a low risk because you scale as you grow.

Normally Administrators worry about hardware procuring when they run out of capacity and about better utilization of infrastructure when they have excess capacity. With Cloud Architectures they can manage resources more efficiently by having the applications request only when they need.

Usage based costing is another advantage of using Cloud Architecture. If a user has a desktop application or a traditional client-server application runs on customer’s own infrastructure the cost is very high but when shifting to the Cloud Architecture customer uses a third party infrastructure and gets billed only for what was used.

Parallelization is one the great ways to speed up processing. For an example if one compute-intensive job that can run in parallel takes 200 hours to process on one machine but with Cloud Architecture it would be possible to do it in less than one hour. This can reduce the total processing time in a cost effective manner.