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When it comes to cloud computing, understanding the difference between DIY in the public cloud and managed cloud services can save your business a considerable amount of time and money.
Whether you are making a full move to the cloud or setting up a hybrid solution, there are clear advantages to using Cloud Volumes Service for AWS. But before we go into the finer details of the benefits of the fully managed file service, we’d like to give you a crash course in the nuances of public cloud. To help you make the right choice, we'll explore the nuances of cloud management.
Should I Manage My Own Cloud Infrastructure?
Although we’re sure you’ve heard of the biggest public clouds out there, it never hurts to have a refresher. Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud, and Azure are market leaders, and Cloud Volumes Service is available for all of them. In terms of the real price of consumption (bandwidth and capacity), companies either pay for what they use (PAYGO), utilize a recurring subscription, or go with a combination of both.
If your company has decided to move to the cloud, chances are you already know about the benefits of cloud computing. But all public clouds face a common challenge: a lack of support of provided services, which means that clients have to handle cloud management completely on their own. Managed cloud services--as the name implies--take care of the legwork for you, with the same level of security as an on-premises or self-managed environment.
What are Managed Cloud Services?
Cloud services, in a nutshell, manage your cloud storage for you. Although the public cloud provides access to a limitless amount of storage and extremely fast computing servers, managing a cloud deployment doesn’t always work out as planned. The problem is that it takes a lot of time to manually configure your cloud environment, including provisioning storage and adjusting throughput, and your organization is likely to need an entire team to manage the cloud--a struggle well-known to on-premises users. Thankfully, managed cloud services solve this problem.
Previously, managed cloud services were a much more expensive option since each company had dedicated hardware to ensure security. With the rapid evolution of technology in this area, such as virtual servers, cloud providers have been able to reduce the costs of managed cloud services without sacrificing the key benefits.
NetApp® Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for AWS, a fully managed cloud service, is native to the cloud, meaning that you can expect bare-metal-like performance. In many cases, it’s less expensive for enterprises to house their workloads in the cloud because of the raw price of resources; with prices starting at $0.10 per gigabyte per month in all regions, NFS & SMB support, and advanced data services, NetApp’s fully managed cloud service on AWS surpasses the capabilities of the public cloud alone.
A few of the advantages of CVS for AWS are:
- High availability and fault tolerance, meaning your team doesn’t have to worry about downtime;
- Three adjustable performance tiers, so you can match your workload to the best service level;
- NetAppÒ SnapshotTM technology means your team can quickly replicate dev/test environments;
- Snapshots can be used as backups and occupy space incrementally;
- No refactoring required;
- Compatibility with a wide variety of Windows and Linux workloads due to the support of SMB 2.1, 3.0, 3.1.1 NAS, and NFSv3 protocols;
- Configure a volume in seconds;
- Up to 100TB of capacity in each volume;
- TS-AES 256-bit encryption locks; and
- Faster time to market—snapshots enable rapid deployment and testing of environments.
Be a Cloud Hero.
Cloud Volumes Service for AWS’s adjustable performance tiers will make you a cloud hero at your organization. 
Get all the Benefits of the Cloud Without the Manual Labor
Self-management is expensive, and it’s important to keep in mind that a company will need to pay extra for a team to oversee the deployed product. The best fully managed cloud services save your company money in the long run because they provide high performance and multi-protocol support that lets you easily spin up volumes in the cloud. And, to boot, you can change performance and capacity tiers dynamically to suit the precise requirements of each individual workload. For example, you can crank up performance to the Extreme tier in seconds when running a performance intensive workload, like a genomics simulation, and crank it back down to a cold data tier when it’s not in use (for example, on the weekend).
NetApp® Cloud Volume Services for AWS offers consistently high performance of over 450k IOPS. With high throughput and low latency, it can meet the demands of any of your workloads —from Oracle databases and HPC applications. By offloading the manual work of managing your company’s data in the cloud to Cloud Volume Services for AWS, you can put more focus on the strategic side of IT and growing your business, and spend less time worrying about infrastructure.
Which Approach to Cloud Computing is Right for You?
To determine which approach--self-managed or fully managed--is best for your business, we suggest taking several factors into consideration: the size of your company, your security concerns, the amount of support you need, the cost. But at the heart of the matter is how much autonomy your company wants, and how much time (and effort/personnel) you’re able to expand on manual administration.
Cloud Volumes Service for AWS is light touch, but you have the option to control the nuts and bolts to a certain extent. Ultimately, we recommend choosing an approach that makes it easier to manage your mission-critical applications and workloads in the cloud. With NetApp® Cloud Volume Services for AWS at the helm, you can better leverage the power of the cloud to work for your business.
