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 its usage 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 the best way forward so that they could be compliant with their entitlements.
Should they have stayed with their current architecture and just adjusted their licenses to comply with their usage, they would have had to upfront CAD 400k in the first year and a total of 5-year TCO of CAD 750k.
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 CAD 408k. Which is a CAD 342k 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 helping person of CAD 39, these savings translate for them to be able to help 145 people over 5 years.
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, engineers, entrepreneurs, 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.
