When I started my IT career in the late 90's
i have seen technology companies setting up local /personal infrastructure all by themselves that involves spending big money, soon the dynamic transformation of IT industry took place which have put pressure to retain / reuse the infrastructure. The dropping costs of hardware increased the demand for using newer hardware. We all agree that optimized usage of infrastructure is the key for any technology StartUp company.
In my previous blog post
i have provided insights into how a technology startup could leverage IBM Cloud Services (
http://goo.gl/nKa8B3). Now in this post
i will try to provide more detailed information and scenarios of how this could be further achieved.
In general, the bottom
up stack for any technology startup is
Networking, Storage, Servers, OS, Middleware, Run-times, Data and Applications. Traditionally, companies manage all of this stack in their local / distributed office space, which we refer as on-premises (on-Prem in short)
Now let us see how this could be transformed into cloud managed stack
Adopting
IBM Softlayer Infrastructure as a Service will offload 50% of the stack. Softlayer offers various packages and subscription models that a startup company could evaluate and subscribe so they need not worry about
Networking, Storage and Servers.
Advantages
- 24/7 Guaranteed availability
- Pay as you use model
- Dynamic expansion of the storage
- Optimized usage by releasing the infrastructure when not needed
- Saving on real estate
In this very dynamic and volatile IT world we know how fast the technologies keep changing. In this environment the success of a startup company is defined on Speed to Market. The developers who perform the ground work should have quick access to various tools, open technologies and Runtimes to deliver before competition. Adopting IBM Bluemix Platform as a Service will off load another 25% of the stack which provides developers a treasure trove of services not worrying about Operating Systems, Middleware and execution Run-times.
Advantages
- Developers/testers focus only on how to accomplish their goals without spending time on setting up the environments
- Instant access to development tools and services with automatic inclusion of dependent packages
- Develops delivery integrated & made easy
Value for money is important for everyone involved... Startup companies, delivery and end customers. Adopting Software as a Service model will offload 100% of the stack where applications are born on cloud, delivered on cloud and consumed on a cloud. Applications and it's Data are cloud managed. End customers just request for an instance that could be provisioned in minutes
Advantages
- No manual installation / deployment required
- No shelf life after procuring the software
Now let's see how, these various Cloud Service models make sense with a simple scenario.
Sara and her friends have great ideas to start a technology start up company. They quickly performed market research and found that the requirements from the field are very volatile and competitive, so they have to speed up the implementation and delivery. This is going to put pressure on the hardware to buy, networks to setup, software to use, etc., They have decided to start with the bottom up approach.
First, they off loaded Network, Storage and Servers to IBM Softlayer by taking appropriate subscription that would suit their project. Remotely accessing their machines, they have installed the required software and kick started the development / testing activities and delivered on time.
Soon the enhancement requests followed, which provides enhanced capabilities like mobile access to their application. They also realized that they might not need all of the machines they subscribed to, but they might need a different configuration. Using Softlayer management tools they backup and release the unwanted machines, request for fresh hardware which is provisioned in minutes. To address the mobile requirement, Sara decided to leverage IBM Bluemix PaaS that provides ready made mobile development platforms enabling their developers to develop right on the cloud, deliver using DevOps and automate the whole testing and integration efforts.
By now the Sara's company came a long way in gaining customer confidence and reputation. It is essential for them to manage the content they produce in the company like the policy documents, test cases, results, etc., and the importance of a content management system is clearly seen. Sara evaluates IBM Navigator on Cloud (INoC) and finds it as the best solution. INoC is delivered as a Software as a Service so Sara places a request for providing one instance (which is 4 nodes) and creates project specific folders to store documents and provided team specific access. Also store company policy documents, etc., providing secure access
In the above scenario we could see how a small Start up company leveraging IBM Cloud Service models could evolve into an enterprise while standardizing their infrastructure during their growth path.
