
Cisco confirms it’s killing Intercloud public cloud in March 2017 - mandeepj
http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/cisco-confirms-its-killing-intercloud-public-cloud-in-march-2017/
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adrianN
I don't like the idea that the whole Internet is running on the servers of a
single company. Can't we do something to increase the competition in the
"cloud" area?

~~~
setq
It's not. If any of the big three entirely disappeared there wouldn't be a
tear shed. It'd be an inconvenience at most and people would suddenly be
reminded about portability and lock in.

At a microscopic level it's pretty stupid, dangerous and short sighted
building your product to conform to any of these providers' services past the
PaaS level. I see people with whole business on AWS who are a billing dispute
away from weeks of downtime.

~~~
discordianfish
Why is it stupid, dangerous and short sighted? People say those things about
cloud vendor locking like it's a obvious truth. I really annoyed by this
arrogance among my systems minded peer group.

I get where this comes from, but it's too simplistic. Even if your build close
around the AWS primitives, why is it harder to migrate away from this _when
necessary_ than building the alternative yourself from before you can proof
your business or build any MVP.

I'd say use whatever service you helps to get your product out there fast and
allows you to iterate quickly. This will also free time to consider your long
term options.

The primitives and constraints imposed by a cloud provider often make your
life easier even if you migrate to bare metal or another cloud.

I'd even go so far to argue the other way around: You get away with way
shittier, less future proof design when running on bare metal and have a ops
team taking care of your pets. Not being able to move that to a cloud, private
or public, would concern me most.

~~~
setq
I've build a couple of startups and sold out, worked for a couple of well
known ones as early employees and now reside in an architecture position. This
magical free time never appears, particularly when your business is suddenly
return focused after your capital comes in. The low capital cost of the
services your are integrating typically is used as a justification to utilise
them more.

Then a client comes along dangling a few million quid/dollars etc who wants it
somewhere else for regulatory compliance or wants to self host it and you have
to turn them away.

It's not about making your life easier in the short term, it's about building
a solid business foundation and continuation plan and a good DR strategy. A
lot of people don't consider this and crash and burn and it's not pretty.

Edit: your approach is known among my circles as the "Ferengi badass"
approach.

~~~
discordianfish
> This magical free time never appears, particularly when your business is
> suddenly return focused after your capital comes in. The low capital cost of
> the services your are integrating typically is used as a justification to
> utilise them more.

Never talked about magical free time, I'm talking of not having to dedicate an
ops team to maintain your bare metal infrastructure.

> Then a client comes along dangling a few million quid/dollars etc who wants
> it somewhere else for regulatory compliance or wants to self host it and you
> have to turn them away.

How do you imaging this being easier with a bare metal infrastructure than one
on AWS? It really depends on the specifics: If you're using managed services
and the customer wants a on-site solution, you need to find replacement for
those. If your customer needs something geographically close, deploying to
another region is trivial compared to building our a DC suite.

> It's not about making your life easier in the short term, it's about
> building a solid business foundation and continuation plan and a good DR
> strategy. A lot of people don't consider this and crash and burn and it's
> not pretty.

Indeed, and depending on the specifics it might be much more reasonable to run
in the cloud.

~~~
halomru
>I'm talking of not having to dedicate an ops team to maintain your bare metal
infrastructure.

You can still build an architecture that works on any of the large feature
rich cloud providers with minimal retooling, and that can be deployed on bare
metal if needed (minus automatic scaling, load balancing etc.)

In the end the trick is to build infrastructure agnostic apps that work on AWS
as well as on IBMs cloud

~~~
setq
This. OpenStack seems to fit that role well.

~~~
discordianfish
Introducing the complexity of OpenStack just because you might want to migrate
off from AWS at some point?

~~~
setq
No. Use ansible and run simultaneous infrastructure targets in rackspace on
openstack and on AWS. Scale one up if the other shits a brick.

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network1
Does Cisco do anything innovative any more? Seems like a dinosaur that is
trying to survive. Buying a bunch of acquisitions due to not being to innovate
internally isn't a positive sign. Seems like they miss many market
transitions. Probably explains their large yearly layoffs.

~~~
crozz
I remember them having some impressive demos of Telepresence and something
called Cisco Spark (which probably is an acquesisiton like you said). You join
a meeting on your phone, just like Lync(Skype) but if you walk into a
meetingroom with video conference equipment it transfers to that.

~~~
wikibob
Cisco spark was a knee jerk reaction to Slack. It's a very poor knockoff (much
worse than Microsoft teams).

~~~
crozz
You're probably right. I was mostly referring to the integration with the
Teleprecence technology that you get if you have their super expensive video
conference setup.

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inopinatus
There's a famous quote, usually* attributed to Thomas J. Watson: "I think
there is a world market for maybe five computers". This is usually trotted out
as an example of expert predictions proving spectularly false. But in a
roundabout way the consolidation in the cloud sector is proving a truth at the
heart of it.

* wikipedia says there's no actual evidence that Watson himself said this.

~~~
alltakendamned
We started by connecting multiple terminals to one computer. Then we moved on
to the PC where 1 terminal was connected to one computer. Now we are in the
age where 1 terminal is connected to many computers.

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nepotism2016
I work for a big corp working on openstack, given the rate of companies
dropping openstack makes me think I should look to move on

~~~
alex_hitchins
Have you looked into Apache CloudStack? I would be interested to hear your
thoughts on it if you have given it an appraisal.

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godmodus
i didn't even know cisco had a cloud.

i wouldn't say amazon claimed another victim but rather cisco failed at
advertising its services.

granted it'd been difficult, amazon already has a massive platform to
advertise itself.

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zeveb
How many other folks here had never even heard of Intercloud?

I think that if I _had_ heard of it, I'd have initially placed it as a middle-
of-the-road choice. Cisco's no Amazon or Google, but it's also not a
Microsoft[1], IBM or HP. It's certainly not an Oracle.

[1] I'd only _initially_ place Azure as bottom-of-the-stack; I've heard enough
good things about it that in an actual greenfield cloud project I'd consider
it a contender.

~~~
bfung
Just to clarify, Oracle has a cloud too, not just a database product:
[https://cloud.oracle.com/home](https://cloud.oracle.com/home)

I think Cisco's and Oracle's cloud are both not heard of before?

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flippyhead
I didn't even know Cisco had a cloud.

~~~
RubenSandwich
It's amazing how many cloud providers there are. Here is another one to add to
your 'They have a cloud?' list. CenturyLink:
[https://www.ctl.io/](https://www.ctl.io/).

Note: I am in no way affiliated with them; I just heard they had a cloud a
month ago so they are the newest addition to my 'They have a cloud?' list.

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aconz2
Where does all the hardware go when one decides to shut down an operation that
large? Can I buy it?

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csears
Cisco were not operating a public cloud, so there is no hardware to get rid
of. Intercloud was a way for a network of smaller "Cisco Powered" cloud
providers to interoperate and allow workload mobility to/from on-prem Cisco /
OpenStack deployments.

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vkat
There are still investments in the Openstack space and I work on one of
them(Managed openstack deployments). Intercloud was previously EOL'd 4 months
ago, this is just the formal announcement.

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amerine
I have a few old colleagues that are(were?) working on IaaS powered by
OpenStack stuff at Cisco. I can only assume they were working on this. I hope
they get to move onto other projects :-(

~~~
perlgeek
If not, I'm sure there many companies building private cloud projects that
would welcome OpenStack experts with open arms.

(My employer would hire such folks too, but you'd have to be willing to move
to Germany).

~~~
CalRobert
What's the talent pool like in Germany? I looked at moving to Germany for a
while and it seemed pretty strong. I'm in Ireland now but the companies I've
worked for have all had German representation in engineering.

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jlebrech
saying "amazon claims another victim" is misleading, it's like saying the race
leader in a Formula one race is responsible for one of it's rivals not
finishing the race.

~~~
geodel
Not really. It is most like big box store chain claimed mom-n-pop store, which
is quite common.

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Gigablah
I wouldn't call Cisco a mom-n-pop store...

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kinkrtyavimoodh
It IS a mom-n-pop store in front of Amazon as far as the 'cloud' is concerned.

