

IT needs to get over its cloud denial, or management will get over IT - ccraigIW
http://weblog.infoworld.com/whurley/archives/2009/02/cloud_computing_1.html

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TomOfTTB
I've noticed a lot of people who talk about "the cloud" really have no idea
what they are talking about. I've been trying to move parts of my agencies'
infrastructure to the Cloud for some time so let me dispel a few myths.

(For the record, contrary to this article's title the bottleneck for me has
been management all the way)

Cloud Computing is not easy: The person below who claims you can get a cloud
application up in a week has clearly never tried to put a mission critical
cloud application up at all. Managing virtual servers can be as hard if not
harder than actual servers in many cases because you have to automatically
track a bunch of items that would normally be static (is the server active,
does it have an ip, if so what is that ip, if not you need to assign an ip and
then automatically track that ip, etc...)

The Cloud is not necessarily standardized: The above example looks at
environments such as Amazon which are hard to maintain because of all the
virtual up and down happening. The other end of the spectrum would be services
like Microsoft Azure. Azure is easy to use but it's a platform that has to be
written to. You write an application in Azure and you have to rewrite
significant parts of it to take it somewhere else.

The Cloud is not always cost efficient: The Cloud is only cost efficient up to
the point where you can afford to fill a server person's time. Once that
happens having a full time server person becomes more cost effective.

Management IS NOT going to be the one pushing this: The article claims IT
should adopt Cloud Computing or Management will. Unlikely. In my experience
Cloud computing makes people very, very, very nervous. Let's put all our data
on someone else's server does not go over well on its own. Add that to the
fact that management types have been trained by the world to think
"outsourcing = more expensive" (which is true in non-tech areas) and you have
a very steep uphill battle.

Sorry for the long comment but a lot of this Cloud hype is getting out of
hand. I'm in favor of Cloud computing but we have to remember it's a tool to
solve some specific problems. NOT a tool to solve every problem.

~~~
anamax
> The Cloud is not always cost efficient: The Cloud is only cost efficient up
> to the point where you can afford to fill a server person's time. Once that
> happens having a full time server person becomes more cost effective.

Actually, it's a server team's time. Server persons sleep, go on vacation, and
so on.

As the tools get better, that "amount to fill" keeps getting larger and
larger.

And, what are the odds that your team is as good as Amazon's?

That said, your team cares about your stuff more than Amazon's team does.

~~~
sokoloff
> And, what are the odds that your team is as good as Amazon's?

S3 was down unscheduled more in 2008 than we were. (I only know about their
major published widely outages, and know about all of ours that lasted more
than 15 seconds.)

I realize that's not a perfect indicator, maybe it was an especially bad year
for S3/good year for us, nor is their app apples-to-apples against ours, but
one of the primary reasons we CAN'T afford to go even to S3 for "cheap" file
storage is that it represents a serial reliability problem: both "them" and
"us" have to be up for us to make money.

When we price it out, the 3-year fully burdened cost of our in-house storage
vs S3 pricing is about a wash. (It's 5-10% in favor of in-house, but I'm sure
we're not perfectly fairly accounting for all the tiny costs [someone has to
file purchase orders, do shipping/receiving, calculate depreciation and file
tickets to let EMC techs into our DCs to replace failed drives, etc, etc] in
our model, but that is after accounting for the IT team dedicated to storage
and the on-call rotation portion allocated to storage.)

If we were a lot smaller, it would be a no-brainer to try to use cloud
services where it made sense, but as Tom said and anamax clarified, once
you're at scale and have access to good IT staff in-house, the cloud offerings
are not particularly compelling cost-savings measures.

(Edit: I should perhaps clarify. We do use S3 now, in production, for one of
our offerings that is not core to our business, and one for which an arbitrary
8 hours of downtime would not present a problem. We also built two years ago
the ability to overflow our bulk/cold image uploads to S3 if we run out of
space on our in-house storage. Here again, if we suddenly find ourselves
having substantial unforecast demand, it's better to go out to a third party
than to turn customers away because the disk is full.

99.90% is >>> 0.00%. :) )

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cchooper
The press needs to stop using "the cloud" as a fancy-pants synonym for "on the
internet".

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DLWormwood
The more I read about The Cloud(tm), the more I'm convinced it's just Far East
outsourcing all over again. I worked with an Indian outsourcing firm as one of
the few American programmers, and I can tell you Cloud computing is going to
hit the same wall: communication. No matter how much money you save upfront or
ease of prediction that the contract could give you, you WILL lose time and
effectiveness due to the increased communication the inserted organizational
layer will introduce.

~~~
holygoat
At least from my perspective as an engineer, AWS in particular removes huge
layers of nonsense, and there are no increased layers of communication.

It's cheaper than buying machines (by a huge amount!), cheaper than keeping
them running, and I can make changes on the fly that would otherwise take a
week to grind through netops.

If load spikes (as it did recently for one of our customers), the conventional
answer is "we can't buy 20 more servers in 2 days"! My response was "why not
use EC2?"

For a new project, rather than submitting a PO for $20k+ in hardware, I can
say "it'll cost $140 for the first month". Much easier to approve -- I can put
that through on expenses!

Finally, if you consider that most large companies outsource datacenter
management, whether truly outsourced to a services company, or "internally
outsourced" to another division, using a cloud system that at least
acknowledges your right to remotely administer your own service is a step
forward, not a step back.

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buro9
I read stuff like this, and the same questions that I've put to Microsoft and
Amazon come round again... can data placed in the cloud be kept within a
geographic/legal set of borders through policy and how do we approach
compliance rules for archiving, freedom of information and data protection?

To these questions, deafening silence or waffle. Never a serious and practical
response.

The cloud is immature in terms of it's enterprise applications until these
kind of questions are being addressed with multiple answers.

For small business the cloud may be a godsend, but to the enterprise the cloud
is something for the small guys to play with that might make them better
customers/partners.

~~~
wildwood
The docs for Amazon S3 state that a bucket can either be kept in the US or in
the EU. How precise a location are you needing? (They're not going to have
multiple data centers per zip code.)

Aside from that, I'm not sure what role you would expect them to take for
archiving - isn't it your job to decide what data needs storing, and how to
organize it?

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pj
The cloud is the most perplexing place on the internet. The cost savings are
so dramatic, it's a waste of time to do ROI. Applications up and running in a
week that used to take 6 months.

The Cloud seems too good to be true, but it's not. It's real and it is better.

I remember reading the Steve Jobs interview by Playboy and he said he was on
the edge of the petroleum revolution, starting the PC revolution. Twenty years
later, the internet revolution and now here is cloud computing that is going
to make the internet just blow up.

Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud
computing.

The cloud is an inevitability. FUD is holding us back. The Cloud is the way of
the future.

~~~
shizcakes
The cloud is indeed real - but not necessarily better. There are real risks
associated with it, not just FUD. Outsourcing every aspect of your business
can potentially increase your focus on your "core competencies", but you run
the very real risk of having a provider close their doors, forcing you to re-
evaluate at a moments notice. The "cloud" isn't some magical thing where
hardware failures don't happen, it's a real infrastructure managed by someone
else. When you hide everything behind the term "cloud" (as in: But we don't
have to evaluate their architecture - it's in the cloud!), you risk relying a
little too much on someone else's ability to manage a
datacenter/network/infrastructure.

Sometimes this is a good decision, sometimes this is not. IT people hate the
lack of clarity, because when something fails and they can't explain why or
what they did to prevent it (nothing! it's the cloud!), it's their ass. And
that's a very real risk.

~~~
holygoat
This is why I like EC2, as opposed to something like Azure. If Azure goes
away, you're out of luck. If EC2 goes away... bring up your own Linux,
Windows, or OpenSolaris instances, and run your apps there.

Granted, that's not true of S3, SQS, or SDB... but seriously, how hard is it
to program against an abstraction layer? Easy enough to rewrite your own
"store_photo" function to use a replacement for S3.

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anthonyrubin
There are no silver bullets.

