Running extreme workloads in the cloud: A guide

As any IT professional knows, running large and resource intensive workloads in the cloud is extremely difficult. The cloud is often billed as a panacea, but the truth is that for most organisations, architecting large workloads in the cloud is a heroic endeavour – one that must be executed with exact precision. There is no margin for error, and one small misstep can result in nightmares for CIOs. According to the Forrester study, "Cloud Migration: Critical Drivers For Success", 89% of early migrators have experienced performance challenges after migrating their mission-critical applications. Running mission-critical applications in the cloud is difficult. Alleviating risk, limiting business disruption and ensuring the target architecture will satisfy the most stringent SLAs and performance requirements requires extensive experience and a special skillset that is rare in the industry. A few months ago, I was speaking with a prospective customer about his organisation’s current infrastructure situation. They were in a tough spot: to stay competitive, his company needed to push its SAP workloads to the cloud. However, in his view, this wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. With a 50+ terabyte database and over two million transactions daily, shifting to cloud wasn’t a real possibility - not even a remote one.