Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Summary

We’ve seen that hybrids can be cost optimal, but there are many varieties of hybrids, and technology is evolving rapidly, shifting the boundaries between the architectures that are visionary and the ones that have been proven. Architecture must be driven by performance, user experience, elasticity, and availability goals, the relative costs of various cloud services and dedicated and thus flat-rate resource strategies, an assessment of the unique demand variability and architectural requirements of the application, and ancillary costs, such as network costs and pricing plans.

Finally, dedicated, flat-rate resources can be combined with on-demand, pay-per-use resources in many ways, ranging from dedicated resources in data centers interacting with pay-per-use resources from a service provider, to pay-per-use resources in an enterprise data center interacting with flat-rate resources in the cloud, to a combination of multiple rate plans in either the enterprise data center or the cloud.