With the news of HP Helion Public Cloud to close down in January 2016 we can again re-consider main public cloud risk factors we always should keep in mind.
Of course this is not the first time the public cloud provider is going dark, getting out of business or just shifting the strategy so the public cloud is discontinued (Nirvanix, Megacloud to name a few). As soon as public cloud is a mass market this takes a lot to compete in this low margin area.
Public cloud provider has to be a really big player to support the huge compute resources in the data centers across the globe. All the leaders in the area are having them: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Google. To some degree this can be considered a significant risk mitigation to rely on the leader CSP (Cloud Services Provider) that currently demonstates vision and strategy execution in public cloud area (for example, you can see those CSPs positioned at Gartner's Magic Quadrants upper-right part).
Nevertheless, if the public cloud you are using was announced to be closed down, what are the factors that can make migration from it more expensive, hard or even impossible, so you are getting “locked in” the that cloud? I would assume the main of them (but for sure not all) are:
- Using CSP-specific functionality that can't be easily migrated. This is a typical risk of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model as opposed to the IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). You are not just dealing with some virtual machine images you can export/import/recreate; you are using vendor-specific services.
- Keeping a lot of the data in the cloud. For the data it is easy/cheap to get in, yet moving out of the cloud is typically charged much higher.
- Using public cloud as a primary infrastructure could be considered a risk as well. One thing is just to “burst” into public cloud when it is needed for the compute elasticity, another thing is to be fully based in public cloud.
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