In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Leda. The God Zeus was the father of Pollux, and the mortal Tyndareus was the father of Castor. They were twins, however. The ancients, apparently, didn’t quite understand genetics like we do.
In the myth, Pollux was immortal, while Castor was mortal. When Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin.
Fast forward 3000ish years later and we have a similar story of Capex and Opex.
Capex is short for “Capital Expenditure” and Opex is short for “Operating Expenditure.” And at least in an IT context, the two are a lot like the twins, complete with the “mortal” Capex and the “immortal” Opex.
Amazon recently tweaked the terms and pricing of their cloud computing platform, EC2, making it more tempting for CEOs to make “the big switch” to cloud computing.
The cloud – with its operating expenditures – is immortal. That is, you pay continuously, renting computing power, rather than owning it. However, (theoretically) the servers never become obsolete, and maintaining them is the province of an outsourced team, not in-house IT. The traditional datacenter model – with capital expenditures – is mortal. That is, you pay for a server once, and use it until it becomes obsolete.
It can be all too easy to assume that the “correct” decision would be determined by some sort of formula – something like: [(Server Costs)/(Years of use) + overhead + manpower] vs. [Cost of 1 year of Cloud Service]. But it’s a false comparison.
The Cloud and The Datacenter provide solutions to the same problems, but the solutions they provide are slightly different and need to be evaluated for measures other than cost, like, for example, performance.
That is, when moving to the cloud, some performance factors will be completely out of your hands. Connecting through the Internet to the server means your connection to the server is only as good as your Internet connection. Any application which needs to have constant, reliable, low-latency connections will probably be better served in a standard datacenter IT environment – VoIP and VideoIP, in particular.
And of course, there’s the key problem of being at the mercy of another company’s quality control.
Don’t get me wrong – cloud based IT and cloud based software are getting better all the time, and for smaller enterprises they can be cost effective and provide adequate performance. (Note the key word in the previous sentence was “adequate.”) And there are a lot of advantages that cloud computing has over standard data center computing. What cloud computing lacks in performance (and ability for performance monitoring) it can make up for in provisioning – it takes a hell of a lot less time to provision a cloud server through Amazon than it does to order a server from Dell and integrate it into your datacenter. It all depends on what your priorities are.
So whatever happened to Castor and Pollux? Well, Zeus decided to let Castor share Pollux’s immortality, and they were transformed into the constellation we now know as Gemini.
That’s probably a more fitting end to our tale than anything else. It can be hard to play oracle, but if you had to ask me what the future looked like, it would probably look like a combination of traditional datacenter IT and cloud computing working together, each dealing with applications where they’re the best at what they do.
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