Compute Cloud

A Compute Cloud allows public cloud subscribers to scale out their workload to meet the demand for additional processing power dynamically.

Why is the Compute Cloud Important?

Without a Compute Cloud, individual businesses would have to carefully plan their anticipated computing needs using capacity planners and purchase and provision the hardware they might need in advance. This approach carries the risk of over-provisioning with the potential for wasting capacity in idle systems. The consequence of under-provisioning is slow applications, system failures and lost revenue.

This problem is a major reason why we have seen the wholesale migration of private data centers to cloud computing. Making a business case for not adopting cloud computing is becoming increasingly difficult. Lower administration costs and subscription-based billing are additional reasons for switching to cloud computing. Instant provisioning also has the benefit of always meeting the computing needs to support changes to markets and customer demands in hours or minutes versus the weeks of waiting while you purchase hardware and schedule downtime to upgrade.

Adopting a Compute Cloud Approach

Public cloud providers have specific configurations designed to scale out existing Windows and database workloads. Servers can be provisioned that match the workload profile, such as cache memory rich or a large number of CPU cores.

Containerizing applications allow easy deployment on any cloud because the machine image carries the applications and the required components from external libraries and the operating system. The Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can even run containerized versions of the Actian Data Platform, which enables it to scale faster than running images that must run scripts to initialize an operating system image before the application is run.

Serverless deployment further abstracts server specifics from application developers to simplify scaling and application management. AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions are examples of serverless services.

Compute Cloud Economics

Cloud computing uses a utility billing model, so you only pay for the resources you consume. Your business may only need to scale out to meet seasonal or end-of-month processing peaks. In this case, you can scale out computers during processing peaks and deallocate resources when you are done. Predicting how many CPU or storage resources you will need in advance is hard, but the cloud computing model grows to meet demand. A business pre-pays for CPU and storage units and is usually billed monthly for actual usage. Cloud providers allow budgets to be set so resources can be throttled to contain excessive costs.

Cloud Bursting

When you run your own data center, your applications are tied to just the servers in your data center. Cloud bursting is a form of hybrid cloud computing that allows a business to scale beyond its private cloud when running out of capacity. The private cloud can be configured to pass computing loads to a secure public cloud to meet peak demand application processing loads.

Multi-Cloud Compute

Just as businesses adopt a dual-sourcing strategy for IT infrastructure services to avoid vendor lock-in, they can take the same approach to avoid being taken advantage of by a sole cloud provider. Most large organizations already operate their applications on multiple cloud platforms. Some application providers, such as Actian, provide a single user interface for customers to deploy their data management services to multiple cloud platforms.

Compute Cloud Benefits

Below are some examples of the benefits of Compute Cloud adoption:

• Applications can be deployed and scaled faster in the cloud.
• Lower management costs as the cloud providers manage their servers, including patching and high availability.
• No up-front capital purchasing is required for IT servers as cloud providers bill using monthly or annual subscriptions.
• Customers are happier because they don’t experience slow applications due to resource constraints.

Actian and Compute Cloud

The Actian Data Platform transforms your business by simplifying how you connect, manage, and analyze data on-prem and across multiple clouds. Actian analytics and transaction systems come with hundreds of pre-built data integrations to make loading to help you get the most value out of your data assets.