App engines, cloud power, server architecture. All familiar – and expensive – challenges facing startups. To give advice, and debate how Indonesian entrepreneurs best approach the cloud for the apps or websites, we’ve assembled three experts in this area for a discussion, called “Cloud and Entrepreneurship in Indonesia,” moderated by Eric Meyer, the CEO and founder of Nubefy. The panelists are (from left to right in above photo):
- Norman Sasono, architect advisor at Microsoft Indonesia
- Chua Sher Vin, APAC director at RightScale
- Adi Kusma, president director at Biznet Networks
#15:12: Norman starts off with the announcement that, starting today, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is now available in Indonesia. Chau notes that his company, RightScale, partners with Amazon’s AWS, Softlayer, and MS’ Azure as well, to give startups a choice.
#15:14: “Cost is the most important,” says Adi, who works at Indonesia’s biggest homegrown cloud company, before then conceding that a startups resources and needs are the next factors.
#15:15: “IT is being democratized,” says the Microsoft “technology evangelist,” in that huge computing power is now available to any developer with these cloud platforms. Plus, they can be scaled easily, and paid for on a usage basis to save costs.
#15:17: Chau agrees that the barriers/hurdles have been lowered, and now IT becomes more of a business factor and not a huge technical challenge.
#15:18: Adi believes that companies are now coming around to the idea of the cloud, with, for example, airline companies now willing to put their ticketing systems on such platforms. Then they add more infrastructure resources as they need them and feel comfortable with it. And so they have faith in its security.
Norman emphasizes the security and privacy aspect: at MS, not even Azure employees can access the data, and if any government makes a request to view something, then the subscriber’s permission will be sought.
But, of course, there’s still a huge responsibility on developers to build their apps well, as no cloud platform can prevent you from, Norman gives as an example, a SQL injection hack attack in a buggy app.
#15:22: In terms of trends, Norman sees many games, e-commerce sites, and SaaS elements being put onto the public cloud, as well as smartphone apps. Some startups also tend to use a hybrid system, using some power from their private servers.
#15:26: Being able to scale, and get better speeds, are two more key reasons for making this leap to the cloud, says Biznet’s Adi.
#15:29: Another option is ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) as opposed to ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS), which gives you, says the MS Azure man, an “empty box solution” minus the OS. But if you choose PaaS, you can automate a lot of lower demand times to save a lot of money, which works especially well for app developers who can chart when users might be using less cloud power.
#15:31: “We own one of the largest data centres in Indonesia,” says Adi, and so its infrastructure supports a world-class app even if you’re based in, say, Malang or any other further-flung place in the country.
#15:33: “People want choice,” says Chau, thereby recommending his company’s solution as one that’s a lot more flexible in terms of latency, price, location, with customers of RightScale able to choose between its key cloud partners.
#15:34: But are the cost savings real, asks our moderator, Eric? Of course things fail and break, admits Chau, and that’s why startups still need to think of how to recover from server issues.
#15:35: “We’re at 99.95 percent” of uptime, says Norman – as are numerous other cloud platforms. 100 percent is impossible.
This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, our startup event running on June 8 and 9. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, on our Facebook page, on Google Plus, or via RSS.