The organisation I work for is moving its entire server estate to AWS, so I definitely expect to be working more with the cloud in 2013 than this year.

We got the go-ahead for this work in mid April, and expect to be 100% live in AWS in November, using a team of 5 FTE staff.

We have had a successful POC that was designed to show that everything would work and could be secured. We are now in the final stages of the build, and gearing up for the acceptance and penetration tests. As part of the move, we are standardising on Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2012.

The main driver for this work is cost reduction. For our approx 120 servers we are looking at total AWS costs of about USD $660k per annum, a saving of about USD $1.2m per annum compared to our previous hosting solution. Our experience so far is there is a learning curve to get the most out of AWS, but the benefits of cost reduction and improved performance are achievable.

Having decided on the AWS route, we are already looking at the benefits we can get from evergreen server kit, and how we can move to the new high IOPS (SSD?) storage this year.

Things are a bit hectic at present, but next year we hope to present what we have done at SQLBITS, PASS, and other conferences.