Lesson 5, Best Practices and Use-Cases for Cloud Computing. So when we are evaluating Cloud computing, one of the best practice is to understand the trade-offs of the Cloud computing hosting scenario, and which trade-offs you can tolerate, and what benefits you are looking for. Avoid up-front costs, absolutely. This is a pay-as-you-go model. Have a sensitive data strategy, and understand the risks of the data hosted by a Cloud provider. Start small, maybe build a minimal viable Cloud solution, where you're just getting enough business value from a minimal investment. Nowhere, the opportunities are to use Cloud to reduce costs. Often Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service has the largest impact with productivity, and costs, and use metrics telemetry to exactly understand the value that Cloud is delivering. Especially telemetry when we're talking about Cloud. Telemetry makes measurements or provides metrics of things that we might not be able to say or things that we cannot say. So if there are applications running that might have some errors or log file issues, we obviously want to understand that and know that. Understand who was going to support those issues. Again, use telemetry to look for execution and run-time issues that are not obvious, and to use telemetry to measure data points that the Cloud provider is not providing or is not measuring, and have some data mobility plan. As Cloud matures, more and more use cases are applicable. However, there are some key use cases that are relevant for almost all users. Software hosting and Software-as-a-service, so there are going to be times where hosting software on-premises or on your own just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So Software-as-a-Service is a very cost efficient option. On-demand expertise and support. Quite often, we just can't hire the expertise that we need. So having an on-demand is very efficient for the business. E-mail hosting. We talked about e-mail having a lot of complexities, very labor-intensive. So e-mail hosting is a rate of use case for Cloud computing. Backup services. So in order to make the most efficient types of backups and make backups often, Cloud computers or Cloud computing providers often have the best and the highest tools and hardware for making backups. Virtual Desktops, there are going to be times where you might need more desktops than your existing infrastructure can provide. So Cloud desktops are a great way to go. Development and test environments, we've talked about this quite a bit where we can have development and test environments that actually provide identical environments to our live production environments, and that makes for the best development and test environments. DevOps tools and processes, so we can deploy to our Cloud run-time environments using time-tested processes, efficient business processes. So we can get real-time feedback on what we are deploying. We can involve the customers sooner in the process in order to adjust if needed.
