Should Video Streaming Sites Operate from the Public Cloud?

Online video streaming service Netflix will complete its move to the public cloud in early 2016 when it shuts down its final in-house datacenter. When the datacenter closes, the popular video-on-demand streaming portal will rely entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, i.e. the cloud.

But just how profitable is the move to the public cloud for other businesses to follow?

"Netflix is not like any other company. They are what I would call typically a single application company, so they have one application which needs to scale enormously. It's an application that at some points of the day has hardly any users, and at others has many, many millions of users," said Gregor Petri, research VP and Cloud Computing Specialist at Gartner.

Helping Netflix to cope with that demand are applications that have been designed to run in the public cloud, meaning they are tailored to scale with demand and be resilient to failure. In contrast, an average corporate IT environment is a more diverse mix of overlapping systems, many of which are unable to efficiently spread workloads across virtual machines in the cloud.

"Most companies have thousands of applications and those applications were not built or designed in a way that you can scale them up and scale them down, so that you can go from one CPU at midnight to thousands of CPUs during the day. Most traditional applications are built in a way that they require a certain size of machine that gives them the performance and if you want more performance you have to go to bigger machines”, Petri commented.

Without software that can easily exploit the public cloud's scalability, the AWS or Microsoft Azure infrastructure become less attractive, and businesses are unlikely to go through the trouble of rewriting the many applications they rely on. The wide array computing, storage and networking services offered on a platform like AWS adds complexity when it comes to getting value for money from the public cloud.

For many businesses, cost will continue to be a barrier to using public cloud infrastructure in the near future. Public cloud infrastructures are especially likely to be more expensive than an in-house migration, where a company has relatively fixed computing needs, and doesn't need to run datacenters with large amounts of reserve capacity.

The problem with only considering cost or control when considering the public cloud is that it ignores the likely factors which businesses seek when migrating - security, performance, flexibility. These factors directly influence a company's IT decisions.

Today, the use of cloud services for IT scaling is growing rapidly, driven by constantly falling prices and the wide ecosystem of services.