Video Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video) 409
Robin: I am Robin Miller for Slashdot. And who do we have with us today?
Curtis: Hi, I am Curtis Peterson. I am with RingCentral, and I am the Vice President of Operations.
Robin: You know, I heard you guys tossing around the term ‘server huggers’.
Curtis: Yeah.
Robin: What does that mean?
Curtis: Well, you know, they are a dying breed of IT guys that in all legitimate phases actually built a good career around putting in infrastructure for companies and businesses where they ran their local apps. They put their files storage in there, they put their email application on premise, they usually took over a broom closet or a leftover refrigerator storage room and converted it into a pretty nice little server room. But the world’s changed—we’ve gone cloud, we’ve gone network, we’ve gone application, quick integration. The server huggers are the guys that won’t give up their little rooms and keep hugging their little servers.
Robin: Aha. So now you are saying that network is the computer—I heard that once.
Curtis: Yeah, I heard that once too. I have to admit that I’ve been around long enough to know both ends of that cycle.
Robin: Okay now, here’s the thing that gets me—when we say the cloud, aren’t we really saying some space on somebody else’s hard drive and a blade server or else a virtual server somewhere?
Curtis: Yeah, of course. At the end of the day, there are still CPU or processors, there are still spindles, there is still memory, there is still power and network and things moving around. But it is not on premise anymore. It is collocated in the larger data center for the efficiencies of scale are more green, the efficiencies of scale are easier to run and operate. For customers it is more about reliability and uptime.
Robin: What you are saying is that my friend Joe with his little hosting service—what about him? Where is he going to go?
Curtis: He goes out and he brings collocation space and he puts services in there and he provides them either over the top in the internet or with direct connectivity or secure links out to the businesses that use Joe’s services that he hopes.
Robin: Yeah. Actually he is. He controls the servers themselves. But he is in a big facility, you know, he has got a couple of cages in Northern Virginia. So how about him? What does he do when he takes your stuff? Is he in the cloud? What is he?
Curtis: Yeah, sure. He is in the cloud, but there is more than just having servers in a collocation center to make up a cloud. The cloud is a design concept to an application. It means that that hosted service is accessible anywhere in the world, not just in that one network for that one customer. It is usually persistent across multiple devices, so I can get my hand-held smart phone or my iPad or I can work on my computer I can do it from Starbucks, I can do it from my office. And I am seeing the same persistence of data out there. So if your friend Joe designs applications that way, and is hosting it in a data center with really good internet and backroom connectivity, then sure, he is typically meeting the definition of a cloud occupation.
Robin: And has for many years, for that matter.
Curtis: I am sure a lot of years ago we were calling this an ASP, so in the late ‘90s and early 2000s there were application service providers. The big difference between that time period and kind of where we are now is the application service providers typically deployed single tenant based systems in the infrastructure inside the cloud. So each customer had their own set of servers, their own set of networks, their own applications instance. What we have done in the last few years is realize that the scalability of that model and the operational expense of that model is really not different enough from just putting that service inside the company to really make a compelling scale cloud argument. Cloud also includes this concept of multi-tenancy which then brings in that ASP model up to the modern age.
Robin: Let’s talk about small businesses. They are either just getting on the internet, they are still some out there who aren’t.
Curtis: These are the same guys waiting for the yellow pages book to show up every year, right? You know, I worked with a small business not that long ago that actually had a security breach inside their building. They used internet only sparingly. It was some casual email, mostly with the younger staff. A small business, family owned. It was in the printing business. An attacker got inside their system, encoded all their files and demanded fifty grand to unlock the files. This is not a new story. So I had a conversation with the gentleman that owned the company. I said, “Don’t pay off the guy but what you need to do right now is you need to put your storage in the cloud.” That way you could have your on-premise files, and you have this backup out in the cloud where you are not going to get exploited for those images back, twenty years of his work to be precise.
Robin: Yeah. No doubt you found somebody who could undo, who can decrypt anyway.
Curtis: Yeah, well, we won’t get into that side of it, but sure. Small businesses, you know it is already a struggle. I have worked with small and medium businesses my entire career and people have a hard time realizing these guys work 18, 19, business days of the month which is typically 20, 21 days. And that just covers their expenses. That last day is the only time that family makes money. And if you are spending all that money on this super smart guy that you need to protect your data, or to run a 24x7 IT shop, it is really a strain on your finances. But not only that, you put a lot of load usually on a single individual. Presumably, he wants to take a vacation one day. He needs to leave your shop for a couple of weeks. And that’s where cloud scale can really make a big difference.
Robin: That’s really a good point. Now here is the question: Slashdot readers tend to be that IT guy. Whether for a small business or in the bowels of Citibank, we’ve got them. All that is a lot of programmers. Maybe more programmers. How does this move to the cloud affect the IT guy? How should he manage his career in light of it?
Curtis: Oh I mean this is actually, the server hugger IT guy should be celebrating this move. This is a huge opportunity to improve their skill set and to grow in their career and become even more valuable. Look, a company that puts a couple of applications, on a couple of different servers in a closet and still maintains a backup on paper or has an accountant on the side, when they put all their eggs into the cloud basket, you know, they really need a network that performs all the time—class of service clearly set up, network performance that is well understood, great internet connections, sometimes even backup internet connections on there.
And then the next part of their service is they can become what they originally were. You see, 20 or 25 years ago, when the IT explosion hit when the ability to buy a clone IBM server even really a regular IBM server for under ten grand and put it in a business. The IT team became the Holy Grail in the company. They could automate something quicker than anyone else. You didn’t have to go to an outside firm to re-engineer an entire process line. Somebody could code it up real quick. There is a new era coming where you can start taking applications from one piece of the cloud, from another piece of the cloud, start gluing them together and putting together really awesome business processes. So that IT career is going through a little transformation cycle but I think actually the better days are ahead.
Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think most admins are worried about losing their job, I think they are worried about cloud services going down or disappearing and having nothing they can do about it, let alone information security and other factors.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Funny)
What, you're saying that cloud servers don't manage themself? This is outrageous!
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Informative)
Even worse - someone you don't know manages them, and they can get real unaccountable at times, especially once your PHB signs a contract w/o telling you.
Certainly there's SLAs that almost every cloud provider touts, but just try to get a typical provider to honor one (that is, without having to sic a lawyer onto 'em first.)
The other dirty little secret (and why I tend to keep the servers in-house for the most part) is the nickel-and-dime billing that adds up awful damned quickly. AWS for example is quite useful, but they charge per GB/hour, for every 1000 PUTs, every 10,000 GETs, and etc. Overall, if you're not careful you can rack upwards of $4k/mo just to host a handful of servers with hot backups and a fair amount of data and traffic on them (I've been able to get it down to $1200/mo for five small-but-fairly-busy servers, but it takes a lot of automation on the back-end to shake out your backups, work to keep the devs from getting stupid on the non-prod/staging boxes, optimize disk usage, etc.)
Cloud providers make for excellent temp hosting and for bare-bones startups, but be prepared to lay down some serious ducats if you want one to do anything permanent, enterprise-sized, and/or production-like.
And no, I ain't hugging the damned servers - I use Cloud providers where they make actual sense, but for no other purpose or cause. After all, I have cost and security concerns which cloud providers have not yet addressed to any competent admin's satisfaction.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen none that promise legal indemnity for any data stored on their cloud.
Until they offer that, I'll hug my server, rather than get fined or sent to prison (yeah, nobody goes to prison for something like that, but it's theoretically possible) .
Re: Wrong concern (Score:3)
Then look for a cloud service provider that has been awarded FedRAMP certification at the FISMA Moderate level. Then evaluate their controls yourself.
Oh, and speak to a privacy expert because your "reading" of privacy law is incorrect.
Re: (Score:3)
I am familiar with SOX, PCI, HIIPA, FISMA and other privacy requirements. It is my job.
You don't get legal indemnification because the cloud service is providing IaaS in most cases. You aren't outsourcing risk. Proper configuration, application security and the like are still YOUR responsibility.
(You CAN get indemnification clauses if you're using their services AND you pay for it.)
The legal requirements from privacy and security aren't absolutes -- nothing is. You have to take reasonable accomodations and
Re: Wrong concern (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course you have to either provide backup yourself or routinely hard-verify the cloud provider's backup scheme. And you'd better have a backup-backup offsite recovery contract for when the cloud provider announces it can't really recover (e.g. Hurricane Sandy). And a super-backup plan in case the cloud provider disappears with no forwarding address, or has all its servers confiscated by DHS.
So.... tell me what the big advantages of "cloud" are again?
sPh
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked around the PHB doing something like this by telling him we'd written our own cloud software and were using it because it was more secure than what is currently available.
He doesn't talk to cloud guys, because we've already got a cloud provider (AFAHKT).
Yes, things like this [dilbert.com] really work in real life.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:4, Insightful)
If you spent 100m/y on hosting - couldn't you do that cheaper yourself?
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, this is a reasonable approach(unlike some other more fallacious arguments). Some of us are even bound by law to maintain the integrity of certain classes of information(personal, medical, financial). Yielding physical control to another organization, no matter what their reputation, removes your ability to perform due diligence.
Re: (Score:3)
On top of that, you then require a much fatter pipe to the internet, as opposed to keeping your file servers and such in-house, where you can run 100BaseT or 1000BaseT and get high speed connection to your servers.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:4, Interesting)
(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)
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More likely Disney would just have to make the accusation against any server with your "cloud provider". Not one you ever actually used. Possibly even one at a completly different site.
(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)
This is more or less what happened with Megaupload.
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Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that, you then require a much fatter pipe to the internet, as opposed to keeping your file servers and such in-house, where you can run 100BaseT or 1000BaseT and get high speed connection to your servers.
Nah, my experience has been management decides not to get a bigger pipe to the internet, because that cuts into the cost savings, and the company just learns to live with sluggish response. And the money lost from this is not counted against the gains, because it comes out of a different account.
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I think due diligence can be done with audits, but those will be costly and they have to be done on a schedule to make sure things stay up to snuff.
The question often becomes, as with Adobe right now, how quickly can you get back up and running when a snafu occurs. If you control your own backup servers and redundancy and offsite storage, you will know exactly how long it will take to get back up and running.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I hug servers for the same reason you do. But in fairness, if you want to use "the cloud", you can always encrypt stuff you put in it.
Me, I'm more worried about the internet going down, and my stuff becoming inaccessible.
Re: (Score:3)
and THEN losing their jobs?
since the failure would be their fault, not the PHB who pushed it on them due to 'cost cutting'
Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, who cares what "Curtis Peterson says"?
Person who works for company producing X says everyone needs X.
If I move to "the cloud" then I have the ADDITIONAL worries of:
1. YOUR connection going down.
2. MY connection going down.
3. Getting access to YOUR facility to troubleshoot a problem. Physical / remote / whatever. Why isn't that server booting?
4. SOMEONE ELSE at your facility annoying the government so that the FBI / CIA / NSA / whatever takes ALL the servers.
5. How do I know that what I legally have to keep private really is private?
6. What happens to my systems when all of your CxO's decide that they need more yachts so they jack up the pricing?
Fuck you, Curtis Peterson. RingCentral is the LAST place I'd put my data. You don't even understand why people are avoiding "the cloud" but you're happy to make up stupid insults to describe them.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The real issue, is picking the right cloud service for your organization.
Some you will have great deal of control, others they do everything for you. You can also setup the contract that they are responsible for such data and if it goes away they need to compensate for the loss.
There is an impression that each of us will make a better system admin then anyone else. However in real life if we run our own servers we run into issues where you don't have the budget for the remote offsite location. You needed t
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
> However being it is suppose to be the cloud company key job to keep it running.
Yes, supposed to be, and actually do are two different things. And most of the time you don't find out about the cloud host's deficiencies until far too late. One cloud company I had a personal linux server with got hit with a DOS attack and their response was to ignore their customer service email and phone for almost a week while trying to clean it up. Needless to say I bought another VPS elsewhere, restored by backups and cancelled my account at the original place as soon as their systems settled down enough. I couldn't possibly imagine leaving my business systems vulnerable to those kind of shenanigans.
> also with a proper contract you can squarely blame them for any mistake
Are you truly that naive? If you have an SLA with *your* client to uphold it doesn't matter if you have someone to blame or not. Your client will blame *you*. It's your decision to go with a service company that has caused you to miss your SLA so it is your fault. Period. Say that SLA violation costs you $100,000. I can bet you your annual paycheck that the agreement you signed with the cloud provider will only see you getting refunded hosting costs during the outage and not a nickel toward your actual losses. So yeah, you lost $100K on the SLA violation but good news! You're getting $250 off your cloud bill. Sweet! Er. wait...
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, there are concerns about reliability on a day-to-day level, as well as the question of "Will this service be around in 3 years?" And related: "How much money are we going to spend transitioning to a service that might not be around in 3 years, and then how much money will we spend transitioning off if it goes away or we don't like it?"
But there are more problems than that: in some contexts, the "Cloud" services just aren't as good. If my "network" is made up of a bunch of laptops traveling throughou
its called the SledgeHammer Principle (Score:5, Funny)
all else failing you want to be able to take a sledgehammer to your server (to make it go offline if its run off the rails)
IBM will actually sell you a server that this is an approved method (for %BIGNUM% dollars but...)
Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Funny)
No you see if you are an admin at a cloud service provider you should just place all your cloud servers in the cloud cloud.
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Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?
Obviously, it's Turtles all the way down. [wikipedia.org]
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Instead of "server huggers" we think of cloud sysadmins as Lakitu, a helpful koopa that rescues your applications when they've gone off track. Lakitu also throws spiny eggs at those suspender-ed and unshaven hackers who try to penetrate your kingdom's defenses. True, Lakitu can be knocked offline allowing such hackers to steal your bitcoins easily while your cloud floats along unattended, but this rarely happens. Given the success rate of Lakitu in the literature, I think we can easily agree that it's ko
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I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
I run two diesel generators, they're backups for when the local utility stuffs up their responsibility and fails to provide power, it's exactly the same reason I'm not going to outsource my server farm to someone else.
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I wasn't saying it was never necessary. Just that "Someone needs to" is a far cry from "I need to"
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Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Informative)
If you can manage to get a link to a "cloud server" where the SLOWEST link to the server meets or exceeds 1Gbps for small businesses (with 30ms or less latency) , and you can get 10Gbps or faster (and bond multiple links to expand bandwidth further) for larger organizations, AND have daily backups in easily-migrated formats stored in escrow by the cloud provider in the event that the government raids and confiscates servers because some drug cartel or "piracy" ring happened to have cloud services on the same physical box as your virtualized servers, AND you have net neutrality so Comcast/Time Warner/Cox/etc. can't throttle your network speeds because you're in the "top 1% of users" (read: you're actually using the services they offered to sell you and you agreed to buy then they reneg on their contracted offerings) then it will be a practical option.
Until then, fuck cloud servers. Seriously.
Re: (Score:3)
It is however a pretty good refutation of the summary claim that admin's are avoiding moving to the cloud because they are afraid of losing their jobs. The servers are still there whether at a cloud service or individual company and still need administrated. If anything cloud shops create more admin jobs. The company still has to admin their servers, they just don't rack and stack them.
Putting things "on th
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
I've been in IT since the '80's, and every company I've worked for, large or small, has had their own backup generators of some sort. Some, at start-ups, were just a portable gas generator that they could set outside the back door and fire up to keep a few critical servers running. Other larger companies had jet turbines on standbye.
All for the same reason that companies are hesitant to commit all of their IT to the cloud - keeping control. It's not about jobs, it's about being sure that critical services are available when you need them, and also who's neck you're going to throttle when things go wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
Generators may not be the best example, because of economies of scale. It is cheaper to run a couple gigawatt power plants than thousands of kilowatt generators. A diesel generator tends to be for backups, or perhaps a conversation piece when you fire it up to make sure it still works every few weeks [1].
Servers are different. A cloud provider will be using the same type of hardware that their clients will be using, be it blade enclosures, 1U x86 servers, an EMC VNX backend, Cisco Nexus fabric, ASA firewalls, and so on. The big question... do you pay for the servers sitting in your data center, or do you pay for them sitting in some data center Bog knows where. Either way, those servers will get paid for.
[1]: If you can hear people over the noise it makes.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Insightful)
For electricity? Perhaps.
But the need to maintain control of their own documents is no less for a lawyer than a Hospital, as any lawyer would tell you.
Re: (Score:2)
You're talking about the physical components versus the software components.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no.
You never worked for a law firm, have you? Data integrity, availability and security are paramount in firms larger than a few partners. This is made more difficult because many (not all) lawyers think they know everything and will happily dump gigabytes of confidential documents onto unsecured laptops and dropbox accounts, if you let them. And what if you represent defense contractors? Data must be secured in very specific ways and managed/monitored only by those with valid security clearances. I won't even address the liability issues associated with not ensuring attorney/client confidentiality. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Funny)
There's a Chromium extension replacing all occurences of ”in the cloud” by ”in my butt”. Conveys the same message.
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Informative)
And here it is: https://github.com/panicsteve/... [github.com]
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Funny)
There's a Chromium extension replacing all occurences of ”in my butt” by ”in my butt”. Conveys the same message.
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How's 'the cloud' working out for them?
About as well as investing in AIG turned out for some people. Risk/reward continues to be a thing people have to evaluate. I'm not defending the status quo evaluation as being correct, just that 100% risk aversion isn't necessarily a reasonable approach.
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:4, Interesting)
I just replace "in the cloud" with "let somebody else control your valuable data".
"Cloud" is great for some things, not so good for others. Just like every other technology ever invented.
Anybody who doesn't understand this is either a complete retard or a filthy, lying marketeer. Which one are you, mr. Peterson?
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody who doesn't understand this is either a complete retard or a filthy, lying marketeer.
You've got a bad assumption there -- namely that the two are mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the first is a PREREQUISITE for the second. So, by definition, if he's a filthy, lying marketeer, he's also a complete retard.
By the way, my guess is that he's both.
Re: (Score:3)
With it also being rather unclear who else might have access to this server.
There's also the issue that in order to use a server on a LAN generally the only requirement is the LAN. Use "the cloud" and in addition to the LAN you need connectivity between your LAN and where ever the server might actually be.
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you've ever had to work with vendors when there's an outage you will know how bad that is.
Even with a single vendor the discussion usually goes like this:
Are you sure it isn't YOUR equipment?
We don't service YOUR equipment.
No one else is having a problem.
We aren't showing any problems on your line.
Have you tried rebooting your CSU/DSY and/or router?
Once you add a second and third vendor (the "cloud" vendor and whomever they use for their connectivity) you'll end up with a mass of denials.
It doesn't matter that your business is down for a day. They'll be happy to refund you one day of the cost of their service.
And once it FINALLY comes back up everyone involved will deny that any changes / repairs were performed on THEIR network.
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:5, Insightful)
> Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's
> server"
Those of use in Europe already think "one of the US Government's servers". The difference is negligible.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... totally different from "the cloud". What was the OP thinking?
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I replace the word "cloud" with mainframe. 'Cause that's what a mainframe is. Amazing to think that the Hollywood movie script writers are getting it right by accident now.
not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Breaking News! Someone selling cloud services says anyone not using his type of product is backwards. Details at 11.
Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck off.
Great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a wonderful idea! Placing control of your mission-critical infrastructure in the hands of others is DIVINE!
Sorry, but I think we'll retain control of our own stuff. At least when we have downtime then we can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, rather than whine helplessly to tech support.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the idea that organizations may want to keep control of things that are highly sensitive makes a lot of sense (from a security perspective) but from an reliability perspective I don't know that I buy it. People seem to have this built in sense that "I'm safer when I'm in control" but that is not always the case, or perhaps it's more a case of "you never actually have as much control as you would like to believe".
Example: If you look at deaths per billion kilometers traveled; Air, Bus & Rail (mo
That's not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh look a condescending dickbag who labels people who don't buy into his business model.
Fuck you Dice, fuck you and your sponsors.
Slashdot, you drunk. Go home! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad disguised as a troll. These are getting more common here.
Adobe Creative Cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
How is moving everything to the cloud working out for those users?
You can take my local servers from me when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
Re:Adobe Creative Cloud (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Adobe Creative Cloud (Score:5, Funny)
It's Adobe's fault for hugging their cloud servers instead of putting them in the cloud....
Leasing is always more expensive than buying (Score:5, Interesting)
It's cheap in the short run, especially if you can't afford the hardware. That's why people used to lease time on IBM mainframes in computer centres. Now people lease time on x86s in computer centres, not realizing that buying enough for your base load is affordable, as well as cheaper in the long run.
The leasing (cloud) people just love people who don't know about costs.
No matter how much you try (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory Blackadder (Score:5, Funny)
Edmund: Never had anything you doctors didn't try to cure with leeches. A leech on my ear for ear ache, a leech on my bottom for constipation.
Doctor: They're marvellous, aren't they?
Edmund: Well, the bottom one wasn't. I just sat there and squashed it.
Doctor: You know the leech comes to us on the highest authority?
Edmund: Yes. I know that. Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart, isn't it?
Doctor: That's right, the great Hoffmann.
Edmund: Owner of the largest leech farm of Europe...
The Cloud and Net Neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud-based services company exec shills for cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
...film at 11.
Why would I ever buy into any idea someone is selling who is in the business of selling services based on that same idea? Isn't this just a sales pitch with a smart-ass insult thrown in to gain some kind of attention?
What's old is new (Score:2)
To me, this whole thing seems silly. We had centralized computing "back in the day". The mainframe was The Cloud. The data was stored there, software lived there, we accessed it through dumb terminals that were basically a keyboard and monitor with really long cables. But that "ivory tower" setup was annoying for departments that wanted to have control over their computing resources. So each department got their own servers and smart terminals (computers). Now it's apparently too much work for departm
Data Ownership (Score:3)
If you don't own your server, you don't own your data.
The first rule of computer security... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is physical access... which is impossible with cloud services which means they are inherently insecure.
If I don't control the actual machine that has my data on it then I don't control the data.
Talk to a bank... any of them using cloud services? Yes... but with their own cloud with machines they control.
That is how the cloud should be in the corporate world. The company you buy the cloud from wants to sell it as a service. That's great for them but unacceptable for many customers because the customer often must maintain control over the software, the hardware, etc. For various reason... maybe you want reliability. Maybe you want security... there are lots of reasons.
This cloud argument he's making is also self contradictory because the cloud operators themselves own and operate large server farms. So what they're saying is that THEY should have servers but you should not.
This is nonsense.
hugging? how quaint (Score:3)
im flat out fucking my server.
take that, cloud geeks.
Well played... (Score:4, Interesting)
Posting someone's stupid slashvertisement for "moving into the cloud" THREE stories away from "Adobe's Cloud Services Down...again" (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/15/1429204/adobe-creative-cloud-services-offline-again)
Nicely done!
It very much depends on your business and situatio (Score:2)
Peterson is being kind of silly. Cloud makes very good sense for some applications, in some situations. It's a bad idea in others. When you have very peaky demand, a flood of traffic once in a while, cloud may well make sense. A site with primary live coverage of the Super Bowl is a clear example - it would be silly to buy thousands of servers to use them for just a few hours.
An opposite example is the building I'm in right now. It's an office building full of high-paid workers who use email to communicate
Own advice (Score:2)
There's a Bell Curve to ROI (Score:2)
Using cloud deployment tech is good. Even if you intend to keep your servers in-house. But moving everything to cloud isn't always the most cost effective. Large game companies find that cloud bell curve. Some game companies use a bit of a bell curve for gaming back-ends. They start out on the cloud. However, they have enough infrastructure in place already that it makes sense to host the games in-house when they are at the peek. Post peek it becomes much cheaper to put them in an on-demand cloud hos
So, the mainframers finally win (Score:2)
And yup, it means a lot of people are out of jobs. Nope, it doesn't mean they work for the mainframe companies, as they obviously don't require as much staff. And a boon for the NSA, FBI, IRS and other Three Letter Names, as now we are all nicely lined up like humans in a Matrix power tower, oblivious to the complete exposure of our data to any schmuck with power who wants to access it.
Clearly the cloud is nebulous! (Score:2)
Surely you should switch to the cloud, because the cloud is nebulous! In the cloud there are no servers!
Oh, wait, umm, yeah, uhh, in the cloud all your stuff runs on servers.
Yeah, some companies call a XEN virtual machine on a box with 15 other virtual machines a "cloud" server.
Umm, does your "cloud" support online migration from one server to another server?
Does your cloud provide deterministic performance? Oh, wait, what's that you say?
Fuck You And The Cloud You Rode In On (Score:2)
Just say NO to the fucking cloud.
I was expecting more practical advice... (Score:5, Funny)
* Hugging a server may block its vents, reducing airflow and operational life.
* When hugging a server, you may inadvertently disconnect important cables.
* Hugging a server may put your clothes—or you—in contact with dangerous high-speed fans.
* While hugging a server, you are likely interfering with the admins who are trying to get actual work done.
* Driving while hugging a server is a hazard and illegal in many states.
How the cloud works (Score:5, Insightful)
Attention, this is a public service announcement...
The way "The cloud" works.
A Cloud or SASS provider will schedule meetings with your management and give a flashy presentation bragging about their up-time, reliability and how your company will no longer need to maintain software or even have an IT department! They'll even migrate you to their servers FOR FREE! Yay!
You company will sign a 3 year contract and brag about all the savings the project will lead to. It will be fantastic!
You'll begin the migration project and quickly realize that the provider outsourced the conversion project to a random IT team from their "Trusted Partners Network" that consists of 2 people (1 manager, 1 employee) that are clearly located in some other country but refuse to admit which one. Having worked with competent people from other countries before you'll shrug this off as not that big of a deal.
Shortly after that they'll start stalling and delay. You may or may not get finished with the project before your management goes back to the Provider and demands the "Free" migration... only to find out the contract stated something to the effect of "Migration Assistance" and by that, they meant you have to do it with the help of those people on the phone you couldn't understand. Your management will resign itself to just getting it done so they can start saving money and dump it all in your lap.
Liking your job, and knowing that managements on a "Lets save money!" kick you'll do it without complaint. After all, once it's done, its done right?
Unfortunately, once it's done is when the problems will start. Since you did most of the migration work the provider will quickly move to blame the problem entirely on you. You'll start to realize that patching together their garbage product with bubblegum and duct tape might not have been such a good idea. But, you have a good reputation, you logged all the previous issues you'd had, and you eventually win management over and they realize that the product is garbage and you'd better start thinking of long term alternatives. But you're stuck in a 3yr contract so you have time to plan.
Then you get an update from the provider: "In an effort to improve server reliability and security we are deprecating ODBC/SQL connections to the database in 6 months" You'll question this and the provider will come back to you and say "Fear not! We've created our own API! It's great! It even uses our own proprietary version of SQL!!!"
So you'll start reviewing this and find out that their "new" version of SQL differs from the only version in 2 ways: 1. you can't do table joins. 2. you can only retrieve 10,000 rows at a time
You'll take this to management and explain that once this happens, moving your data off their servers will be nearly impossible. Migrating to another product will be very difficult. So your mangement will bring this concern to the provider who will say "If you need help migrating, we have a team that can help you! They only charge $200/hr!" and they'll send you right back to the 2 people that failed in the original migration.
Eventually the products customers will all realize it was a giant scam, and start dumping it. The products parent company will shut down the product, buy a startup that does the exact same thing, re-brand it and start all over again.
Rinse and Repeat.
Ask me how I know this... :-)
I didn't watch the video (Score:2, Insightful)
...But no one said you couldn't move to a private cloud if there is business value in doing so. Cloud is not a scam, the marketing is. Cloud is not a swiss army knife.
One thing they never mention... (Score:3)
These cloud guys always forget to mention one glaring problem with their model - they're not adding any new software to the picture.
Everything they have is available to you, Joe Serverhugger, as well.
So in short you're paying someone else to do something you could do yourself, rather like webhosting in the early nineties.
If you really want a cloud, go build one. It isn't even hard. Then you can stack your stuff on your own servers and enjoy your own profits, instead of outsourcing them for no reason.
Not just cost issues (Score:4, Insightful)
1) I've worked with several virtualized storage architectures on Amazon AWS and we've had instances lock up due to brief, hard to track down SAN drops.
2) I had a customer have to force shutdown 2 VMs in CBeyond's cloud because their SAN latency went up enough that databases started dropping offline. It took CBeyond 2 days to get their SAN back to full operational status.
I do wish the cloud providers would modify their storage model a bit. When starting an instance / VM, use the SAN to copy the whole image to an available server's LOCAL storage array. This fixes a great many latency problems and does not make the servers that much more expensive to build / operate (just a tad more storage in RAID 10 per server). The only drawback to this is for big data users who need beyond a couple dozen TB for a server in the cloud. Most of those situations are already using clustering software that is resistant to failure of a few nodes.
Summary completely misses the point (Score:2)
The article is really making the point that cloud service providers should use virtualization to provide their services rather than running their cloud offerings on bare-metal physical servers. He's comparing Internap (bare metal) with AWS (virtualization).
Idiotic (Score:2)
I love the cloud. I have a 24/7 EC2 instance for personal use (vpn, charing files between my computers in the vpn), I use the compute instance whenever i need to number crunch something (FEM, Inductance calclulations).
But there are reasons to keep things in your own responsibility. The most important reason would be that iff you dont want the cloud service provider to write something "if it fails it fails" then the cloud is as expensive as your own serve, and that only if you dont count the lawyer cost whic
So conflict of interests much? (Score:2)
As others have probably said, once you replace "move your data into the cloud" with "move your data onto someone else's system" management starts to realize what a stupid a risky operation that is for anything that is not company trade secrets. Sure, use the cloud to perform a large scale test of an application
Small vs Big (Score:2)
Hype Hugger (Score:3)
Who on earth is this guy Curtis Peterson? Server Huggers? What about Hype Huggers?
Curtis, don't be a Hype Hugger, don't get trapped in yesterday's hype, you could end up unemployed tomorrow when "the clud" turns into vapour.
I'll keep hugging my servers (Score:3)
With the proliferation of national security letters, NSA spying, and all the other badness we know is happening, there's no way to trust cloud services that are owned by a third party, period. I don't use a public cloud directly, and I do my damndest to avoid doing business with companies that do.
So the guy selling way overpriced VOIP (Score:3)
Says I need to give up my server. I'm a small spread out shop and with few employees, their plan would cost me 250 bucks a month (10 users). This is vs a fairly small VPS on my own gear in a data center that might cost me 20 with a quality hosting provider. Installing a PBX is trivial for a sysadmin. And we spend maybe a couple hours a year looking at it. Couple this with a VOIP dial-tone provider at less than a hundred a month. So my spend is half as much and I can use my own guys to do the few hours of maintenance required a year.
I think this is more he says we should give him moneys because he said so.
Now looking as the company they use a proprietary product that took them 10 years to develop, that runs on commodity hardware. They tout their custom software app as well. This is VOIP, most people do not need something that handles piles of calls simultaneously in many ways a couple small servers are a lot easier to deal with than a big cloud, and can run commonly available software to do so.
Don't trust the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
What is "The Cloud"?
A symbol on a network diagram? - I'm sure that's how it started.
The way I see it "The Cloud" is just a name massively over-hyped by marketing folk for a hosted server that you have no clue about where it is.
I totally get the concept of being able to access your data everywhere and it's a great concept. It doesn't always work. Usually failing when needed the most.
There is a Cloud Computing Concept that I do trust It's called Private Cloud Computing. There is really nothing new about it. We have all been doing it for ages.
Its just simply running your own server. Most business do this and you can do this your self with your own server plus the aid of today's modern high speed internet connections.
If your internet fails you still have access to your data.
I personally don't trust "The Cloud". Think about it for a moment. You are putting your data on a server and you have no clue as to where it is. You have no clue about who else is able to see that data and you have no clue about who is watching as you access your data and probably no clue if that server is up to date on security patches.
Yes its cool that you can access it everywhere accept oh.. There's no cell coverage here and oh the free wifi might not be secure and oh I've been hacked.
Cloud backups? yeah right. I wonder how long it will take to backup my 3TB of videos to the cloud? I wonder how long it will take to restore them if a HDD should fail. I wonder if cloud backups count towards my broadband data cap? Large numbers of ISP's operate data capping the average is 100Gig per month. At that rate it would take 30 months to backup your data and 30 months to get it back.
What if the cloud backup gets hacked, how do I know my data is safe?
The short answer is you don't know if your data is safe. If you have sensitive data, its best not to put it on a server connected to the internet.
So Yes I may be a server hugger, but I know where my data is. I know where the backups are and I know my secure data is and its not stored in a place directly accessible to the internet.
As long as I'm accountable (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as I'm accountable, I want the hardware and software under my control. That way when something goes wrong and my boss calls and says 'wtf', I can give him something more than "Well I called amazon and left a message with our account representative".
It's turtles all the way down... (Score:3)
So, of course, RingCentral doesn't have any servers, either, right? Do they use Amazon Web Service or Google Compute Engine?
What I want to know is, do Google and Amazon point at each other, so neither has real servers, and everything is completely virtual?
Remember ID4 (Score:3)
Whenever I hear somebody say the future is in Internet-worked computing, I remember the aliens that tried to conquer Earth in the movie Independence Day. One of the seemingly laughable premises in the movie is that uploading a virus into one of the alien mother ships could bring down the whole invasion force. Apparently the aliens had an extremely centralized comand-and-control infrastructure. And guess what, we're heading in that direction when a glitch in one "cloud" provider is going to bring down our whole computing infrastructure, if not our whole civilization.
regardless of service levels... (Score:3)
Regardless of what the contract says, when things go TU locally, everyone scrambles because we are personally invested in keeping the company afloat (at least, to the extent that we want to keep our jobs). To a cloud provider you're just another customer, and they really don't care if you live or die.
A local IT group tends to concentrate on getting the job done. A cloud provider tends to concentrate on plausible deniability. Support will run you through "install the latest video drivers and see if the problem persists" while sales managers build up a case that they followed the process and did everything you paid for. And you'll find that what you paid for was process, not, you know, actual resources you could use.
A cloud salesman recently told me with a straight face that they just signed a deal with some former eastern bloc country to provide helpdesk and first level support. He seemed to think this was a reason to use his service. I couldn't help thinking of this [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:2)
or figuring out ways to sell your eyeballs out from under you :(
Re: (Score:2)
Especially if you need "upstream" bandwidth.
Besides, I am still not sold on security. Letting a "third party" have all of our financials and records just makes me cringe.
In practice you would end up having to rely on many third parties. Since you need all of them to provide connectivity to the remote server.
Re: (Score:2)
You missed out ships dropping their anchors where they shouldn't. When can potentially be an issue even if you are hundreds of miles inland. It's possible for a link being broken to affect you even if you wen't even using it.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because you don't have your own server doesn't mean there isn't one. Somebody has to actually run the server somewhere. Or is it clouds all the way down?
Something like that... [xkcd.com]