Over the last few months, I’ve talked with a number people who are concerned about the cost of public cloud services in comparison to the price of traditional on-premises infrastructure. To provide some insights from the discussion, let’s follow two development teams within an enterprise — and compare how they would approach building a similar service.

The first team will deploy their application using traditional on-premises infrastructure, while the second will leverage some of the public cloud services available on AWS.

The two teams are being asked to develop a new service for a global enterprise company that currently serves millions of consumers worldwide. This new service will need to meet theses basic requirements:

The ability to scale to meet elastic demands Provide resiliency in response to a datacenter failure Ensure data is secure and protected Provide in-depth debugging for troubleshooting The project must be delivered quickly The service be cost-efficient to build and maintain

As far as new services go, this seems to be a fairly standard set of requirements — nothing that would intrinsically favor either traditional on-premises infrastructure over the public cloud.