
What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans. - tgriesser
http://gigaom.com/cloud/whats-hindering-cloud-adoption-how-about-humans/?utm_source=gigaom&utm_medium=recent-posts
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jseliger
I don't buy this article. Nothing is "hindering" cloud adoption, per se; the
question is, _what problem does cloud adoption solve?_ For me, the answer is
"relatively few:" I have Mail.app for e-mail, Word / Mellel for word
processing, NetNewsWire for RSS feeds, Textmate for text editing / blog posts,
and so on. None of these will be particularly improved by cloud computing.

But some of them will be harmed by cloud computing: I don't want to have to
have Internet access to access my files; I don't want other people to have
access to my files; I don't want to have to learn a whole new set of tools
that aren't improvements on my old set of tools.

In short, the benefits outweigh the costs. When/if the benefits exceed the
cost, I'll start using the "cloud" more. The advocates of "cloud" computing
aren't empathizing with their users.

Personally, I imagine that we're heading more towards a place where we have
more Dropbox-style local / network integration.

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HerraBRE
Reading that it seemed as if OM considers it a given that cloud computing is
automatically "better" and squishy humans are just getting in the way of
progress.

Cloud computing is in many ways more efficient, but that's really not the only
metric that matters, is it?

There is value in independence, privacy and security - none of which cloud
computing can ever really compete on. There are also many applications where
proximity of data or proximity of processing matters, and the cloud can't
touch those either.

So much hype...

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wanderr
There's also cost. At certain scales (such as Grooveshark's scale) it can be
significantly cheaper to do infrastructure in-house. Try negotiating bandwidth
prices with Amazon.

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lsc
the big advantage the cloud brings is speed of spinning up new servers, for
which it's nearly unbeatable. If you need 1000 servers tomorrow and want to
get rid of them on Friday, there really is no other option. However, if you
can forgo that speed, if it's okay to take some time to get the servers up and
if you plan on keeping them online for a few months, owning starts to make
sense around the time you need 16-32GiB ram, which really isn't very much.

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TomOfTTB
You're assuming either/or. I have a mostly in-house IT infrastructure but I
use EC2 not only for projects that I need to get up and going quickly but also
for traffic spikes. Using a dynamic DNS like Nettica allows you to blend quite
easily.

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lsc
I think that a mixed setup like you describe can allow you to get the best of
both worlds, if all your servers don't need to be in the same place for
latency reasons. "the cloud" is also awesome for backups. you can have a full
backup cold spare system, test it once a week, and pay almost nothing for it.
(this is what those 'micro' instances are for. you have a micro instance
updating your DB on an EBS backend. when it comes time to fail over, shut down
the micro instance and bring up the ebs mount on something beefy.)

my point was just that most systems are on most of the time, and for those
systems, owning saves you a lot of money over using "the cloud"

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seunosewa
What's hindering adoption of my product? Customers!

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billswift
That's why it helps to make something they want. I just wish I could figure
something out.

