'If you turn it off, you don't pay for it' - Shell's long but cost-efficient journey to AWS and the cloud

How the money men were satisfied that virtualisation works for the oil giant

The world's largest oil company - Shell - has finally completed a sometimes painful four-year journey to the cloud.

Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Summit in London this week, enterprise product manager Oskar Brink said internal stakeholders needed a good deal of persuasion before they agreed to let Shell move to AWS. They were, he said, unsure of the repercussions for such a heavily regulated company that has traditionally favoured on-premise systems.

"It's been a four-year journey and a lot of scepticism from many of our stakeholders," Brink told delegates.

"Will it work? Is it secure? Can we get assurance that it will continue to work?" were just some of the questions stakeholders asked.

But with between 8,000 and 10,000 applications, Brink said there was very much a need to "rationalise" Shell's IT, and it was the potential savings it stood to make through having better inventory of its systems and infrastructure that finally sold AWS to the bean counters.

"So we had to look at the portfolio, standardise it as much as we could, and roadmap all the applications we were thinking about for the refresh cycle," said Brink.

Sustainability and risk aversion also became apparent when moving from a situation where 75 per cent of the company was operating with physical infrastructure to one where 75 per cent is virtualised, on Amazon's private cloud.

"Moving to the cloud helps us change the perspective of the infrastructure, and even more so we can look at an off/on capability," explained Brink.

"In fact we like to think more ‘off' than ‘on'. First off, then on. If you turn it off, you don't pay for it. That's what we're trying to achieve."

Brink explained how "the environment as a whole" was difficult to track when splitting physical infrastructure between on-premise and outsourced.

"One of the key things we don't know very well today was the costs of the environment of the whole," he said.

"The cost of the IT, but also licences, data centres - we don't know it all. Finding the trusted sources in all different places [to find the information out] proves very difficult.

"Moving all these pieces into the cloud helps us to get it more under control. At the application level, portfolio management as a whole is easier, and also with optimising we have 5,000-6,000 unique applications. They can be categorised, which helps us rationalise the environment."