There is more to running apps on the cloud than infrastructure alone…

Cloud providers do an incredible job of providing unlimited scalable infrastructure sold on a utility model and with tremendous flexibility. Infrastructure alone is only part of the solution. The challenge is migrating your enterprise applications to the cloud and then instrumenting the necessary services and technologies to ensure the application runs as it should.

Despite the numerous benefits of cloud computing, there is a huge gap between the cloud infrastructure and the enterprise requirements associated with running an application securely, robustly and effectively.

It is important that the application be independent from any specific cloud service so that it has the flexibility to run in multiple clouds or migrate between clouds based on requirements. There is a layer of services associated with the care and feeding of the cloud infrastructure including monitoring, backup and D/R, auto-scaling, security management and billing. There is another layer of service associated with the application itself including customer provisioning, helpdesk, application upgrades, application management and reporting. Finally there is a layer of support services that includes things like cloud migration, business services consulting and account management.

These activities are application and implementation specific and require a deep knowledge of both the underlying cloud platform and the application architecture and usage.