
Delusions that companies have about the cloud - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-have-about-the-cloud/
======
eksith
My comment is still awaiting moderation. Curious, since there are other posts
after I commented. Oh well, here's the repeat:

tl;dr : Disagreement != insanity. Your unwillingness to accept possibilities
you haven't encountered or avoided doesn't mean those possibilities don't
exist or can always be avoided.

Point #1: Bandwidth + power is sometimes cheaper than bandwidth + CPU cycle
costs in many cases. If you have a massive spike, you may not worry about down
time, but you will worry about the bill. There are plenty of occasions where
the cost is unacceptable by comparison. And this is even after initial
investment.

Point #2: If you stick to a generic storage or CPU package that needs no
modification, then yes, go with the cloud. But when, you need to switch
priority for some CPU threads without jumping through hoops or dynamically
allocate high-priority data to primary search spaces and low-priority data to
archives, then you'll suddenly find it comforting to know you have physical
access to the servers and primary control interfaces.

Point #3: Evaporates quite quickly when the U.S. government says cloud data
isn't technically stored by you, so they can do whatever they please with it.
Since you're not the cloud provider, and it's off-site, they can claim "it's
not your data" and use it as evidence. Read : Megaupload.

Don't laugh, that's an actual argument used often by them during court cases.

You store your data in the cloud and if you want it to remain private, it
better be encrypted.

Bottom line: Any extra "Stuff" you add to the stack is another layer that can
potentially fail. More "stuff" doesn't make a better platform, but BETTER
"stuff" does.

There's something very comforting about saying "Hey, Mary. We just lost power
and we're running backups. Could you make sure the generators kick in?" and
hearing back, "Sure, I'm on it."

\--- In addition to this comment, I'd like to point out here (since I'm not
gonna wait for that comment to be approved too), there were some comments
saying pretty much IT folks are shaking in their boots because the "cloud"
makes them obsolete. Who do they think run the "cloud's" IT? Magical pixies?

Granted, some local IT people might be worried their jobs may no longer be
needed, but if you earn your keep, your job will be safe. Or you'll have no
trouble finding work elsewhere.

~~~
cerebrum
> There's something very comforting about saying "Hey, Mary. We just lost
> power and we're running backups. Could you make sure the generators kick
> in?" and hearing back, "Sure, I'm on it."

What if instead you hear back "Sorry, I already tried turning on the
generators but they are not working. What should I do now?"

~~~
venus
> What if instead you hear back "Sorry, I already tried turning on the
> generators but they are not working.

Well I guess you quit in disgrace, because it is your job to ensure you have a
viable fallback, and the personnel to make it happen.

------
kylec

        To put it bluntly, Google has assembled the greatest collection of computer
        science talent in the world. Similarly Amazon has a multi-year lead in delivering
        compute power by the drop, with which it’s happy to provide to you with the
        single-digit gross margins of a successful retailer. Your IT organization simply
        doesn’t rate at this level.
    

Maybe not, but it doesn't need to. Creating, maintaining, and fixing giant
cloud services are incredibly hard problems. I'd even venture to say that the
ratio of difficulty in maintaining something like AWS compared to managing a
handful of servers is greater than the ratio of technical skill of the ops
team at Amazon to the average IT team. This is not to disparage the skill of
the AWS team but to highlight the orders of magnitude in the difficulty of the
tasks.

~~~
rbanffy
The point to consider is whether your IT staff can beat their uptime with your
own servers.

~~~
rdl
Right. As long as you have moderately competent people and reasonable
resources, and are trying to solve the relatively simple problem of a small to
medium sized site, you should come out ahead of smarter people with more
resources (but less per-user budget) trying to solve vastly harder problems.

------
josephlord
Some good points but for me this misses the insider security risk of these
organisations which scale doesn't help with. This could be the company acting
against you or it could be an individual acting without authorisation.

Suppose you are a startup that may be of interest to Google in an acquisition,
why even give them the opportunity to read your mail by using Gmail?

I also have some concerns that the stacked layers (SaaS tool, on Heroku on
AWS) leaves you exposed at all these layers to a bigger pool of insiders and
potential creates different opportunities for outsiders to attack although it
may well still be more robust to external attack than self hosting.

~~~
lunarscape
His argument seems to boil down to 'give us all your data because any concerns
you have are just insane!'. It really irks me to see someone dismiss privacy
and security concerns with such derision. It's also not just companies who
should be concerned. I think the growing unease in the EU about US access to
cloud service data is only going to get more serious.

~~~
_mgr
You haven't worked in corporate IT I gather? Security and Privacy are at the
bottom of the list when it comes to most businesses IT expenditure.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Unless the law mandates it and provides harsh penalties. Health care and
financial companies, to name two industries, spend billions every year on
security and privacy.

~~~
_mgr
Spending billions != importance, especially if as you state it's mandated by
law any way.

I wouldn't disagree with you though in regards to a large proportion of
companies in those two areas. I however was specifically speaking of the other
industries, the majority of which still see IT as an unnecessary expense and
anything more than "new password every 30 days" as an inconvenience.

------
jkat
The delusion I have, which he didn't address, is that the price/performance
ratio is atrocious. Sticking with Heroku, the $3200/m Ronin DB could
essentially be a 1-time purchase if you are collocating, or 1/10th the monthly
price if you go dedicated.

~~~
patio11
The cost of the database to an enterprise is not dominated by how much the
license for the software costs, the hardware costs, or the electricity costs.
It is dominated by how much you have to pay in headcount to manage it. At many
companies, that app would have _two_ people whose full-time job would be "Do
everything Heroku ops would do, except slower and suckier."

I get this same question from some potential customers for AR, too: "Why would
I pay you $X a month when I could buy a competitor's dedicated appliance for
$X and then just pay for phone calls?" "Who is going to maintain that
appliance?" "What do you mean maintain?" "Like, if a security vulnerability is
discovered in a technology AR uses, I stay up all night. Do you have a guy
like that?" "... No." "Do you know what a guy like that costs?" "... Uh,
plumber money?" "Doctor money." "Shoot."

~~~
jiggy2011
To be fair I'm surprised how often I see a rack mounted solution sitting in an
office somewhere with no patches applied since ~2005.

"Your email has always been slow you say? That's because it's been running a
botnet C&C server for some considerable time"

------
defrost
It's a well written article and I agree with his points and have no issues
with incorporating cloud services into the work I do.

There are still two outstanding issues that prevent for now, and will continue
to prevent, 100% cloud operation going into the future.

1) For the most of the work I do any connection to the Internet is not a
certainty and further, thanks to sods law, is most likely absent when most
needed.

Rural farms (I'm Australian) can have all access and external utilities cut
off by flood and bush fire and still need to function in isolation, ditto
volunteer services, remote survey groups, small bands of folks on a jolly.

2) Reliance on the continued goodwill of third parties and their governments.

Like any external service just make sure you have alternative storage for your
data to ensure ongoing operations are never held up or held to ransom by
<insert circumstances>.

------
chops
The only beef I have with cloud/VPS hosting is the price.

Conveniently, the data center I've worked with for years[1] supports a hybrid
setup, where you can use their cloud hosting combined with coloed physical
hardware all in the same VLAN. It's hugely effective, since I can have
physical hardware there to deal with the high-load/high-memory stuff there
(like database servers) affordably, while at the same time, using VPS for less
processor intensive/more ephemeral-load type stuff like webservers.

The result is that I drive to Chicago to work on hardware significantly less
frequently than I previously used to, and it's fully worth it. If their cloud
system goes down for whatever reason, I know their staff is on it, and I'm not
worried in the slightest.

When I was 100% hardware based, I lived in a bit of terror of being out of
town. If something happens, I had to get there. Now if something happens while
I'm out of town, as long as I have internet access, I'm okay with it.
Eventually, when prices go down enough, I'll go 100% virtual, and I'm not
looking back.

[1] Steadfast Networks in Chicago: <http://www.steadfast.net>

~~~
shuzchen
Are you considering you loss of time/freedom in that cost analysis? I get that
cloud doesn't always make sense in every situation, but in a lot of cases
people don't take into consideration these other factors (loss time
managing/maintaining hardware, actual hardware costs, etc) when making the
decision.

~~~
druiid
I would say that should always factor into these equations, and I further
would say that most companies large enough to worry about these kinds of
decisions are indeed factoring those things in.

The cloud vs colo discussions have been done before on HN, but I still say the
decision of one versus the other basically boils down to a relatively simple
if-else/switch statement: If size of company is small and no sysadmins, cloud.
If size of company is medium and sysadmins then cloud or colo based on due-
diligence. If size of company is large and sysadmins and you need very high
uptime then colo (Unless you're willing to spend a gazillion dollars for
several access zones on EC2). Obviously there are going to be lots of if/else
chains but you get my drift I imagine.

Now if you're a small start-up and have a likely outcome of tons of scaling
needed in short order, your best bet might very well be scaling with the cloud
and moving to hardware when you're more established (and if it makes sense
from a cost benefit analysis).

------
Semaphor
Insanity #4; Your data could be accessed by the country the cloud host resides
in.

Oh, wait, that's not insane, it's the opposite. It would rather be insane to
give a government that's known for wanting access to everything–legal or not–
like the US your sensitive data.

~~~
Gustomaximus
This could also be a positive. If you lived in a country where you had
sensitive data at risk you could store this data in a country you felt
comfortable with.

~~~
Semaphor
Though if you'd rather trust your sensitive data to another country you should
ask yourself if you shouldn't be in that other country.

------
sakopov
> [...] If you care about the reliability, security, and the protection of
> your data, then you should entrust it to those who are most capable of
> managing it. If you believe you can match the capabilities and rigor of
> Google’s Security Operations team, I wish you well.

My previous employer was a mid-size life insurance company. That place didn't
use any third party services mainly because it complicated all audits &
compliance since data would remain on 3rd party server. I'm sure everyone
trusts Google with security. The problem isn't with Google or Amazon or
Heroku. The problem is with all these other cloud service providers that
aren't Google, Amazon and Heroku, which are more likely to be featured on
front-page news because of some rookie mistake which lead to a security
breach. The author's view of this issue is for some reason limited to a few
big boys in the industry.

------
tomx
"This thinking is backwards. If you care about the reliability, security, and
the protection of your data, then you should entrust it to those who are most
capable of managing it. If you believe you can match the capabilities and
rigor of Google’s Security Operations team, I wish you well."

They may be good, but naturally introduces more attack vectors into many
applications.

My nicely firewalled and audited application would become exposed to an
undetermined number of people I have never met. e.g.
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp> . It only takes one
rogue person and you have a problem.

My application has 5 trusted people. It would be interesting to know the
additional number of people you are implicitly trusting by using a cloud
service. 100?

~~~
shuzchen
Unless you also run and operate your own datacenter, the number of people you
implicitly trust is fewer but still roughly the same as with a cloud provider.
There's all the datacenter security personal, network and hardware technicians
that could all possibly be "rogue".

------
ragenz
His arguments might stand for Amazon, Heroku and Google, but what about the
smaller cloud vendors? Are they as trustworthy, reliant and cheap?

Even if you ignore privacy and security concerns, what do you really get for
your money? The cloud ain't cheap. If the service is bad it may be easier to
have a student install your web server, put in on the internet and forget
about it the next few years.

And then there is there are all these cloud services you don't actually pay
for, they are financed by advertising or something. You've got even less to
expect there. Why not get your email account from some regional/smaller
source? How can the centralization brought on by the few strong cloud vendors
be better?

------
msandford
The tl;dr version: Cloud services have exogenous risks that you can't control
but trying to avoid them is wrong.

Absolutely false! If your company stands to lose $10,000/hr for every hour
it's not operating (and that's a LOT of businesses) then the idea that "oh
we'll just trust Amazon for this, what could possibly go wrong?!" is fairly
short-sighted. Yes Amazon will work to fix things as fast as they possibly can
but they sure as shit will not write you a check for $50k for their 5 hour
outage.

~~~
jshen
And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative
is, building your own data center?

~~~
msandford
Buying colocation space with a negotiated SLA that provides for reimbursement
in the case of outage. And building enough redundancy into your setup that
even if a location goes completely offline you're still OK. It's REALLY hard
to do that when you know nothing of the hardware and infrastructure that your
app sits on. It's still difficult to do when you know all the details, but
it's easier to control for risks that you are aware of.

~~~
jshen
if you have to prepare for enough redundancy for a location to go down, then
the cloud works just as well.

I'm really not seeing the distinction here.

~~~
msandford
It's very difficult to buy a high bandwidth, low latency link from one AWS
availability zone to another to ensure that my databases are synced properly
such that if one of them goes down the other will stay up, and there will be
minimal/no loss of data. But I can buy colo space from two different companies
in two different but close cities and gain a lot of redundancy.

Furthermore some kind of systematic problem that affects one of the
datacenters run by one organization in one city is very unlikely to affect
another datacenter run by another organization in another city. They're very
unlikely to both make the exact same mistake and have it bite me in exactly
the same way. But the AWS architecture is largely preserved even through
availability zones, datacenters, etc. Easier for that to happen.

[http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-
other-m...](http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-major-
sites-affected-7000006166/) That's an example of precisely the kind of problem
that I'm referring to that wouldn't happen if you were redundant across
multiple independently run datacenters.

~~~
jshen
That makes sense, and I agree, but this seems orthogonal to cloud vs non-
cloud. If there were two cloud providers in different cities, and they allowed
you to buy a good link, then the cloud meets this need too.

~~~
msandford
Yes and no. They won't let me put a link in and have the cross-connect plug
directly into MY switch(es) because a core tenent of "the cloud" is "we
reserve the right to move your instance whenever we'd like to" which is
anathema to the idea of me controlling my machines, switches, routers,
internet access, etc.

The idea of the cloud is that "I just need a box that's SOMEHOW connected to
the internet and I don't really care about the details of how precisely" which
is fine for a great many use cases.

But there are plenty of use cases where the above assumption does not hold.
When it does not hold, using the cloud isn't the no-brainer idea that the
author of the article makes it out to be.

~~~
jshen
Here at Disney we both control our machines, switches, routers, internet
access, etc; and we use CloudStack for an internal cloud.

I think your idea of "the cloud" is narrower than mine.

~~~
msandford
Yeah that's entirely possible. If you're involved in building or maintaining
Disney's internal cloud you have a lot more information about how it works
than some folks on the other coast who don't have the right phone numbers or
email addresses to really figure out how things work. You can -- because you
control the internal cloud -- set certain instances up on physical machines
such that you have all the redundancy that you need.

But "the cloud" as the author describes isn't a thing that you can peer into
and determine it's inner workings, it's more of a black box that you can run
an instance on. AWS, Rackspace Cloud and all the folks who sell VM instances
don't publish all the data necessary or give you "hooks" into the network
infrastructure where you'd need to really make a reliable system.

That's the whole point of the cloud. I pay you a very small amount of money
for a VM that I rent by the hour and I don't WANT to know the details. Once
you start learning (or having opinions) about the underlying network topology
and everything else you're not "cloud" anymore, you're something else. What's
the right name for it? I don't really know. But I would argue that it's not
"cloud"

------
teeja
I wonder how many banks and stock-brokers are buying into handing their net
operations over to a third party?

Anyway, once the words "delusion" and "insanity" got dropped, I realized how
desperate the clown-computing crowd is getting.

------
venomsnake
The cloud is a marketing buzzword. You can determine a lot for a product by
who is pushing for it - it was coined and promoted by the big corporations
that had resources to spare and sell them with a 3-400% markup

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/building-servers-
fo...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/building-servers-for-fun-and-
prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun.html)

While I see the value in making things more flexible and cheap like the open
compute initiative, my cynicism has taught me to assume every time that what
is heavily promoted this way by a entity that tries to position itself as the
middleman - it may not be bad for you, but it rarely will be the best for you.

How many people think twice before handing sensitive info to google after the
David Petraeus situation.

The cloud infrastructure is just a tool - it has its limited uses, its
gotcha-s etc. It is good for prototyping, rapid deployment but after that -
not so sure.

------
damian2000
The cloud based MS Exchange product that's offered to Australian businesses
uses servers based in Singapore.

Whether or not the risk is real or not, the perceived risk of your data being
seized due to laws or actions outside your own country is a major point
stopping take up in my opinion (at least in Australia anyway).

------
lakeeffect
I have had people attempt to explain "the cloud" to me. Most people don't
understand that it's still servers, just in a different place. It was the
first time I understood why the term cloud is used, it just makes sense on a
white board.

take a survey and ask the average person in America, they will tell you its
some new technology in the sky like satellites.

------
sandis
All mentioned things aside, memory-intensive cloud hosted service, like
memcached or redis, provider prices are just too damn high ($400/mo for 2GB?).
I've found app server and/or worker pricing to be relatively okay.

~~~
camus
well , they need to make money somewhere,and it's not on storage that they
will , typically services like caching , db backups ,or even DNS,CNAMES for
some are expensive.

------
JanezStupar
True risks are largely unknown at this time. "The cloud" to me is akin to the
derivative financial instruments. They said that nothing can ever go wrong
with derivatives.

However as a professional I can envision many Black Swan type events that
would bring down the cloud. Asking Google et al about the quality and safety
of the cloud is akin to asking your drug dealer about the quality of the drugs
you are buying.

That is not to say that the cloud and complex derivatives should be avoided.
However on should always hedge their bets.

------
femto
An alternative is to use the best computer science talent in the world to
design a distributed program that doesn't require the best computer science
talent in the world to install or keep operating.

------
summerdown2
The biggest reason I've seen for not using cloud providers is regulatory. In
the UK, principle 7 of the Data Protection Act makes the collector of data
responsible for ensuring downstream security. Unfortunately, most of the big
cloud providers won't let themselves be audited, and won't accept strong terms
in the contract. Until that happens, they can't safely be used for bulk
personal data.

(where safely means the data controller is secure from regulatory fine).

------
rnadna
Security of data is a moral concern in some circles (e.g. academics outside
the USA are quite wary of the Patriot Act) and a legal one in others (e.g.
privacy of medical and financial information). Some jurisdictions have
specific laws about certain types of data not being hosted across a border.
These things may be disagreeable to some, but they certainly are not
delusions.

------
goronbjorn
The widespread nature of these delusions is the exact reason why most 'cloud'
companies are hopeless without a sales force.

------
mscarborough
If you're a software development team, setup multiple remotes and push to them
regularly.

Totally fake, but setup a bash or whatever shell alias for this: `git push
origin; git push codebase; git push github; git push gitlab-host1`

------
mross462
So I occupied an elite circle in Hell when our services failed to deliver.

Revrend!!!

------
derpmaster
The cult of the cloud is great business for me since I specialize in finding
VMM and KVM bugs.

Since corporations want to cheap out and host their previously secure physical
boxes all on one server with a wide open console and management system to get
into this has made pentesting much easier.

I especially like projects like Whonnix, where fools construct this complex
layer of virtual machines on top of virtual machines. It's like taking the
shit sandwich of blobs and bugs that is x64 architecture and ethernet drivers,
and building a whole mountain of shit right on top then calling it secure.

The cloud definitely has some benefits, but if you're handling finance or
require serious privacy better shell out for some OpenBSD racks, virtualize
the routing table and set up pf firewalls to isolate the network with real
actual isolation and not pretend magic isolation. Best of all there's just one
operating system, not three of them piled on top of each other.

~~~
openbsd_bitwise
derpmaster....working on delivering a cloud infrastructure (VMware
5.0)leveraging OpenBSD-based security appliances (GeNUA)for the security
perimeter. Would appreciate any insights on securing cloud infrastructure with
OpenBSD. Do you have a website and do you offer any services with respect to
cloud infrastructure penetration/security design/security testing?

Would be interested in VMM bugs with respect to VMware.

Thanks.

Ron (ron.szpak@gmail.com)

