Now the real work begins:

We need to really take advantage of the services offered by the Cloud Provider and begin moving up the stack. The first step is leveraging the Database as a Service offering of the Cloud Provider, this can drive significant savings and simplification.

Rule of thumb: Be a pessimist when designing architecture in any cloud; assume things will fail. In other words, always design, implement and deploy for automated recovery from failure. The Clouds that are being used have services and functions design to alleviate or automatically respond to failure scenarios. If you don’t use them then you are paying for a function that you have not taken advantage of.

Let us follow the trail of positive disruption and move along to a consumption ‘as a Service’ model

The first step is to move our virtualised workloads and longer term storage, backups and such, into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Now that we have an idea of where we want to go, and why, let’s look at some prerequisites. This does not have to be a completed project, or even handled completely, separately but MUST begin before consumption of any form of ‘as a Service offerings’ can occur.