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The Butterfly Effect Of A Cloud Architecture In An Everyday Life

Normally when you think about Cloud Architecture, you don’t think about what it can do to help the life of someone else. In simple words, our work as architects is to gather information on a client’s environment and usage of it and try to optimize the cost and throughput in a cloud IaaS/PaaS/SaaS.

What you don’t tend to see is that this work has a big significance in the life of someone else, call it the Butterfly Effect. These past months, we helped a Canadian charity that helps people to have access to education perform a DRO (Discover, Reconcile and Optimize) exercise of their current environment. They had several non-virtualized servers using Oracle EE and several options as well as some application servers.

Through the analysis part of the DRO exercise, we found that there were several options that they were not utilizing and some that were over-utilized, so we started the task of what would be for them the best way forward so that they could be in compliant with their entitlements.
Should they have stayed with their current architecture and just adjusted their licenses to be in compliance with their usage, they would have had to upfront $400k CAD in the first year and a total of 5-year TCO of $750k CAD.

With the cloud architecture that we suggested, which is 2 DBCS instances for Dev and UAT – Standard Edition and 1 DBCS instance – High Performance, plus the Application Servers in Compute Standard3Flex. With this setup, their 5-year TCO came to $408 k CAD. Which is a $342 k CAD savings from what they had on-prem.

This doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but when you are a charity and you have an average of helping a person of $39 CAD, these savings translate for them to be able to help 145 people over a 5-year period.

145 people x $39/month = $5655 x 12 months = $67, 860 x 5 years = $339,300

This means that 145 children will have an opportunity to be physics teachers, an engineer, an entrepreneur or whatever they want to be.

As I mentioned at the beginning, you tend to not care who or what you impact when you architect a technology solution, but sometimes, just sometimes there is a huge direct human impact on someone’s life with the work that you do, and that is all right with me.

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