But while moving to the cloud will always deliver significant benefits, the demands of business are fast evolving, requiring organizations from all industries to support a new level of compute power. Today’s banks must build models capable of measuring and monitoring credit risks. Manufacturers must rapidly iterate on product designs to reduce time to market without compromising quality. And pharmaceutical companies require high-performance infrastructure to accelerate insights in genomics and precision medicine.
In these specialized scenarios, running all workloads on the same general-purpose infrastructure is no longer sufficient. Organizations now have a wide variety of cloud options, and they need to make infrastructure choices that best fit their needs and use cases. Making uniform choices has consequences for cost, performance, and scalability, according to Paul Nash, corporate vice president of product for Azure Core Infrastructure at Microsoft. “General purpose really isn’t general anymore, so understanding how to match the right products to your solutions becomes a significant part of capturing the value that cloud offers,” he says.
Because of this, organizations also cannot lift and shift existing systems to the cloud without working through these decisions. “If you try to move an on-premises architecture into the cloud without really thinking through the requirements,” says Nash, “you won’t achieve optimal performance from the cloud.” As they migrate, he adds, companies must factor in what cloud changes: “among other things, the network is different, the disaster recovery plans are different, and the data storage mechanisms are different.”
Especially as modern cloud-native workloads running on Linux and open-source software multiply, purpose-built cloud infrastructure is emerging as a better approach for leveraging the benefits of cloud while, at the same time, ensuring the flexibility and agility needed to grow and evolve in today’s modern dynamic environment.
The power of purpose-built infrastructure
In the past, cloud environments were highly standardized and modular: servers had the same rack width, power configurations, and storage, regardless of application needs.
That’s changing with the rise of purpose-built cloud infrastructure, which consists of a complete set of computing, networking, and storage resources fully integrated with workload orchestration services for high-performance cloud applications. Purpose-built cloud can be customized to handle specific workloads, ensuring low latency, high throughput, and greater resource utilization. Security measures and compliance measures can be easily integrated to satisfy the standards of highly regulated industries such as health care and finance. And built-in features such as redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities help achieve high availability of business-critical applications.
As a result, purpose-built cloud infrastructure enables access to vast compute resources from a cloud platform that not only provides scalability, flexibility, and performance but is also able to support the growing complexity of modern cloud-native workloads.
“At the end of the day, everything is about performance, security, and power,” says David Harmon, director of software engineering for AMD. “With a purpose-built cloud infrastructure, organizations can do just as much with the same compute power at a lower total cost of ownership while still maintaining performance.”