CTO Daily Dose - The licensing hidden cost of cloud computing
Transcript
heis mm from the CTO advisor calm with CTO daily dose we're talking the hidden cost of clouds it's simply around licensing thanks for sse story over on twitter for giving me the topic for today you can explore additional topics hashtag CTO daily dose either on linkedin or on Twitter and I'll find it and I'll particularly talk about it if not on the daily dose hopefully in a blog post so the hidden cost of cloud there is a bunch of hidden costs in cloud but we're going
to talk about one that we can most definitely avoid a lot of pain even before considering moving the application to the cloud and that's licensing this isn't anything new that the industry is experiencing when we went from a physical set of hardware to a virtualized set of hardware there was a lot of questions around licensing even in something as simple as Microsoft OS Microsoft Windows could we legally run ten copies of Wendy's on the same physical server that we used to just run one copy on
doesn't seem like something that Microsoft would approve of same problems exists then and now about Oracle licensing could we run an Oracle database on a VMware cluster and have the same licensing cost the Oracle question is still you know kind of out there but the Microsoft question was answered Microsoft came up with a licensing model with Windows data center and versions of Windows that you can run multiple copies of Windows on the same physical node and not pay a premium to virtualized Windows other software as
we move up the stack other software vendors actually had the same concerns they license typical for example typical licensing licenses per processor so how did that translate to virtualization most vendors today have come out and they've had you know they've had a stance on virtualization and we understand virtualization licensing versus physical bare metal licensing much better today than we have in the past as we go to the cloud we can't make the mistake that is in assume that those licensing rules translate from a virtualized environment
to a multi-tenant cloud environment again we can use our poster child for this Microsoft Microsoft actually didn't have a licensing model for something as simple as when Windows 10 or Windows 7 when you saw your desktop Windows you actually can't legally run a copy of desktop Windows 27 Windows 10 even won back as far as Windows XP on a multi cloud instance Microsoft licensing explicitly prohibits this this means that if you want to do VDI out in the cloud you basically couldn't legally do it in
a multi-tenancy environment you'd have to basically have private cloud bare metal virtual I'm sorry bare metal machines out in the cloud if you wanted to do VDI using Microsoft's desktop OS so vendors such as AWS got around that by offering VDI using Windows Server they just you know give you a remote desktop to a Windows servers in it as a desktop OS but underneath depending our Windows Server that's one workaround in the cloud another big issue that's taking place so Microsoft has solved that problem beginning
in September they'll start to offer Windows client one new server client as a consumer of multi-tenant clouds but another kind of purposeful cost that we're seeing in the cloud it's oracle oracle has specifically come out and said that unless you're running oracle inside of the oracle cloud then you are basically going to pay a penalty meaning twice as much of the licensing cost to run your workload in AWS Azure IBM etc if you want to run Oracle and one of those private public cloud offerings then
you are going to take a premium Oracle is trying to drive revenue towards there is service to allow you to run Oracle inside of that solution so these problems exist throughout all types of applications so before you jump to the cloud and you lift and shift your application application while technically you're suggesting the application should work just long as we don't run into any issues we talked about in yesterday's CTO advisors are talking about workloads that practically don't work run real well in the cloud then
you should be all set technically it's from a cost perspective are you opening yourself to a painful audit or painful true up with your software layer and licensing around the software and applications that you run in the cloud that fits for this CTO daily dose you can follow me on the web the steel advisor com on Twitter at CTO advisor and of course please subscribe to the podcast engage in the conversation hashtag CTO daily dose LinkedIn or Twitter talk to you guys tomorrow daily dose which
we'll talk about dr in the cloud and whether or not you actually need dr talk to you guys tomorrow
