Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video)

Curtis Peterson says admins who hang onto their servers instead of moving into the cloud are 'Server Huggers,' a term he makes sound like 'Horse Huggers,' a phrase that once might have been used to describe hackney drivers who didn't want to give up their horse-pulled carriages in favor of gasoline-powered automobiles. Curtis is VP of Operations for RingCentral, a cloud-based VOIP company, so he's obviously made the jump to the cloud himself. And he has reassuring words for sysadmins who are afraid the move to cloud-based computing is going to throw them out of work. He says there are plenty of new cloud computing opportunities springing up for those who have enough initiative and savvy to grab onto them, by which he obviously means you, right?

Comments

Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you're saying that cloud servers don't manage themself? This is outrageous!

Re:Wrong concern

[i kan reed]

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:Wrong concern

[ravenswood1000]

I like my data to not be in the hands of someone else. I don't want it examined, copied or accidently Googled. Fuck this Curtis Peterson

Re:Wrong concern

[rogoshen1]

and THEN losing their jobs?
since the failure would be their fault, not the PHB who pushed it on them due to 'cost cutting'

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My uptime has more nines than Amazon's.

Re:Wrong concern

[sconeu]

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

[jellomizer]

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 to hold off on those new drives to replace the failing ones.
Sure cloud systems are open to vulnerabilities and human errors. However being it is suppose to be the cloud company key job to keep it running, they should have the budget to keep in business, also with a proper contract you can squarely blame them for any mistake.

Re:Wrong concern

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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:Wrong concern

[BoRegardless]

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

[nine-times]

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 throughout the country, then a "cloud" file sharing service like Dropbox might be very handy. If, however, my network is a LAN with a bunch of workstations hard-lined into it, and I have 5 TB of files stored on a file server, then moving that file server to Dropbox might not offer any improvement at all. If I'm managing those workstations with a Windows domain to provide group policies and single sign-on, there isn't a cloud service that I'm aware of that provides the same functionality as simply and elegantly. You also have to consider which model serves users better when the Internet is down or slow. If everything is on the Internet, then when the Internet goes out, your business is shut down.

So I don't know who Curtis Peterson is, when people start talking derisively about the use of local servers, I usually guess that they've never done real IT work. There are still a lot of situations where you need too much control, too much security, and too much bandwidth to push it all offsite-- regardless of whether you call it "the cloud" or "a hosted server" or "a collocated server". As an IT guy, I'd love to move everything to "the cloud", but it's not ready. And it won't be ready until we (a) have ubiquitous, high speed, highly reliable Internet everywhere; and (b) the "cloud" becomes more built on open formats, APIs and protocols rather than having a bunch of big businesses pushing us into little walled gardens.

Re:Wrong concern

[Em Adespoton]

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.

or, to put it another way: Adobe CC offline again.

Or we could go with the one about the NSA and cloud services, etc.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that admins are in the habit of letting business partners insult them to sell products and services to them. So I guess he's not talking to the "server huggers" but their bosses' bosses instead, you know, the people who also think the IT department is entirely too fond of expensive hardware and expensive employees with specialist know how. Make no mistake: The IT department is the enemy. This guy wants his company to supply the replacement (well, the phone system part).

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Exactly. "SLA mother fuckers, do you speak it?"

I require 24/7/365 uptime and only allow for 32 hours of maintenance downtime per year, scheduled 6 months in advance.

I require my own software stack, as now the cloud company is an attack threat I must protect against, and as I currently don't need to pay for this, I expect to continue to not need to pay for it despite now needing it - this must come out of their pocket.

I would also require contracts further and tighter than any US court currently would ever allow, even if the cloud company agreed.
Breaking SLA requires a direct payment back measured per minute and likely over $500 for each minute of service unavailability.
This must be agreed upon despite where the actual problem is - be it their internet connection, the backbone, or even MY internet connection.
(Yes, I expect them to pay me $500 per minute when my own internet connection goes down, for any reason what so ever, including me pulling the cable out of the router.)

I also would require that court mandated contract to state if the cloud company does not pay me, the president/CEO will be held responsible out of their own pocket, and would require further assurances that this WILL happen.
CEO doesn't have it, I expect government force to take anything/everything they own to make repayment. If any balance is remaining, it goes down the chief officers out of pocket to pay the same as the executive.

Since no court would (or could) mandate such a requirement, and frankly no sane person should ever agree to such terms even if they were enforceable, this simply means no cloud provider even offers anything I need.

I'll give up my own servers as soon as a single viable alternative exists.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud has its uses. It can be a good way to deal with spikes in CPU load or testing situations. For storage, the cloud can be treated as a form of media, similar to tape, disk, optical media, etc.

However, I can sum up the biggest downsides of the cloud in a few bullet points:

1: Security. Lets be real here, a cloud provider has little to no responsibility for client data security. If client data leaks, it will be that individual/company/organization to prove in a court of law that it was the cloud provider that did it, and exactly what was leaked... and most TOS agreements have either arbitration or a no-sue clause anyway. So, the burden of security is on the cloud provider's client. This means encryption and key management, and key management by itself requires a lot of thought.

2: Bandwidth. Even without the data cap issues in the US, WAN links are expensive. Storing data in the cloud might be useful for archiving documents in a secure fashion, or for a SMB to do some file sharing. LAN bandwidth is cheap and plentiful (relatively.)

3: Costs in money and time. They have fallen dramatically -- Amazon S3 is $30 a month for a terabyte, and Glacier is $10 a month. However, fetching that data is a lot slower and more error-prone through the Internet than it would be from a local solution (DAS/NAS/SAN.)

4: Possession of data if the cloud provider goes under. In theory, if a cloud provider goes bankrupt, all drives on all servers should be wiped before the auction happen... but lets be real, most likely the data will just get left there and the next owner of the servers has full and complete ownership of the bits, be it personal records, medical info, trade secrets, bank information, or anything else. The next owner could just make a BitTorrent of the former cloud provider's data and there could be nothing that can be done about it from a legal standpoint, barring DMCA requests. Core company data could be easily sold without any legal ramifications. So, the only protection a client of a bankrupt cloud provider would have would be encrypting any and all data before it leaves their site.

5: Administration issues. It is a lot easier to just disable a user under AD than to chase remote providers and hope they have the ability to lock out users. Some may not.

6: A stake in the company's/organization's welfare. Joe Sixpack working graveyard in the server room probably would care a lot more about data belonging directly to where he works than some nameless, faceless client. If a server he cares about has a dying drive, nobody would ever notice if he pops a drive out from an array on a cloud client's server and does a swap, so he doesn't have to fill out the RMA paperwork with the hardware vendor. If that drive array failed, the cloud provider just tells the client, "c'es la vie, the TOS says you can't sue", and that's that.

Re:Wrong concern

[pslytely psycho]

Not to mention when Disney discovers someone on that server pirated "Steamboat Willie," the government grabs all the servers. Good luck ever seeing your data again.

(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Curtis Peterson is a NSA shill.

On a serious note...

Decentralization should be embraced more than further centralizing the internet (for everything). He makes a compelling argument for the small business where hosting their own servers could cost more than its worth. But that also depends on how valuable the data is, and what it is for. Having multiple locations to backup your data is a good practice anyways, putting it on the cloud is just passing the buck for someone else to handle/decide/protect your data.

But for the sake of argument, how can that one IT guy, guarentee that their cloud services are safe and secure? They can't, they have to rely on the company who is managing their data, where your data is, every other person who has access to that data.

"Having to share an infrastructure with unknown outside parties can be a
major drawback for some applications and requires a high level of assurance for the
strength of the security mechanisms used for logical separation."

I found that and read https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/NIST-Draft-SP-800-144_cloud-computing.pdf which is a decent summary that outlines the potential benefits and problems with the cloud, and it seems to agree that it should be used on a situational basis. Having everything on the cloud is a risky idea though.

Ultimately if technically and economically viable for the organization, using your own servers will inherently be safer than using someone elses

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, we run multiple in house servers, no hard drive that might have accessed those servers is allowed to be thrown out or anything other than destroyed. It means that when the power is out we might not be able to do anything, but the servers are based where they are needed, which makes it a non issue, and it means that even when the net is out or overloaded(I work very hard to keep it so there is some space for everyone) we can continue to function without issue. Trying to get multiple governments and utilities to agree to allow data to be hosted on any cloud service would be impossible, let alone getting them to agree to pick ONE; Besides, if we only have cloud servers where are we going to hide the deathmatch and minecraft boxes? Yet more reasons not to move to cloud, no franken boxes running servers that no-one "knows" about, no more tweaking the hardware until it runs better, or being able to walk over and sit down and fix it locally when someone F***s remote access of every kind.
Yes, some data needs to remain in very much locked down networks and servers, much of that data is related to keeping your lights on(doesn't matter where in this case, the data comes from around the world).

Re:Wrong concern

[cheesybagel]

let alone information security and other factors

This.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us are even bound by law to maintain the integrity of certain classes of information(personal, medical, financial).

To add to your list, +1 Nuclear. Contract for consulting on such things will state data is confidential, for hopefully obvious reasons.

Re:Wrong concern

[atrimtab]

When the cloud is a regulated utility then we can begin to think about putting critical data in it. Or worse running critical infrastructure applications that may be changed by someone else on their timetable, rather than yours breaking what you have invested in.

Right now, in using the cloud, you are just handing what may be your most important asset to a 3rd party who likely does not care about it as much as your organization does. And may happily share it with any number of others who asks via the 3rd party doctrine.

The cloud is fine for unimportant stuff that you can afford to lose or applications that are not critical. Consumer Smartphone apps fit that criteria. But if it is important, using the cloud is like not ever checking the backups you've made. It likely won't be there when you really need it.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I put my mind in the Cloud to use the "power of my imagination". My ROI keeps increasing with the food I consume, and I only have you to thank. Thank you Cloud!

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this.

Cloud services are garbage. If the physical server is dead and is shared by some other customer, you are straight up screwed. This is why OpenStack is a joke.

Now, if one can afford 8 physical servers, then you should. If you are trying to save money (nobody saves money by moving to the cloud unless they were overpaying for leased hardware to begin with, which is also true a lot of the time.)

Like we give up enough by not owning the data center, but that's a legitimate price to pay because the data center is staffed 24/7, even when it's on fire or during an earthquake. But when I can't get someone to physically swap a hard drive, forget it.

You should still own the hardware if you are considering cloud style management. For example, if I normally need 100 servers, but only need 25% of them for half the day, then spinning up all the servers that aren't in use is an obvious waste of power. Rather it would make sense to spin up a new server every time the 95% mark is hit. Much like how child processes in the web server work. Now as long as I have servers to spin up I'm fine. But a new project doesn't have that luxury, but going straight to OpenStack or Amazon Web Services means to over pay for idle hardware.

Nevermind the interconnect costs of shuffling data between the Cloud servers which would cost nothing if you own the hardware.
Then there is the privacy/security problem. PATRIOT act basically tells all businesses outside the US to stay the f*** away. Using foreign cloud servers means you are subjected to both the laws of your country and the laws of the foreign country.

So no, Cloud servers are not worth dealing with unless you own the physical hardware and are only going cloud for management of your own hardware. It's a foolish endeavor to use cloud servers that you don't own the hardware to. I'll give a case point: iWeb in Montreal had these "smartservers" which are VM's that have the entire machine, so nobody shares it. However for the first few months of leasing one, the the virtual network card would keep failing and the physical machine would need a reboot to restore it. Cloud Servers are terrible at scale, because if it overloads the physical machine, it kills all the VM's.

So I may be saying a much of stuff that nobody cares about, but I'm saying that Cloud Servers are just a stupid idea in practice. The point of it is to scale performance hot spots rather than replace the entire server infrastructure with fragile less efficient nodes.

Here's an analogy for those of you who TL;DNR:
Say I have a 10 gallon barrel of water. When the server is overloaded, it drains quickly.
If I switch to a cloud server system, I'm now instead buying 16oz bottles of water and storing it in that same 10 gallon barrel of water. So there is both less physical water in the barrel, and it takes more work to open the bottles. If by chance those bottles are all used up, you now have to get more bottles out of your neighbors barrel that they aren't using. Sounds like it's a good deal, but the neighbor isn't benefiting and the only one making money is the person bottling the water.

Cloud servers = bottles of water. Physical servers = Barrels of water.

Re:Wrong concern

[psyclone]

And since I shouldn't store the keys in the cloud, for every instance that uses some encrypted disk, I need to manually login then provide the key and passphrase.

Seems difficult to use encrypted storage in the cloud...

Re:Wrong concern

[Penguinisto]

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

[Penguinisto]

I like my data to not be in the hands of someone else. I don't want it examined, copied or accidently Googled.

That's what LUKS is for (among other things), as sibling mentioned. I don't put jack shit out there w/o it being encrypted.

Fuck this Curtis Peterson

...with a red-hot iron poker.

Re:Wrong concern

[Penguinisto]

My uptime has more nines than Amazon's.

I've got an HPUX box sitting around with more uptime than some of my junior admins' career spans.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with a SLA, if the company chooses not to enforce it, then you are hosed. Yes, you can sue them, but good luck with that trying to put a price on data, and if push came to shove, they just go bankrupt, then the next owners of the servers will have all your data, free and clear. (In theory, server hard disks should get wiped or destroyed... but in reality, the servers likely won't get touched other than the racks wheeled into a truck to go to the auction house.)

I treat the cloud as another piece of media. Data to it goes there and is encrypted, and I have another backup on optical/HDD/tape just in case I lose access to the cloud storage.

Maybe I am a "server hugger", but there is something to be said about physical control of sensitive data. Not trusting promises of "encryption" or "passwords", or vagaries which don't mean much should something happen. With offsite tape storage, if a disaster happens, and I have to rebuild the entire data center, I can get new hardware, fetch the tapes, reload/restore. With cloud storage, I would have to wait until the core and edge network fabric are completely installed, switches tested and working from both ends, network connectivity online and functional, firewalls in place, then rebuild DNS and other servers so machines can connect to the cloud provider before I can do any type of restoring at all.

Storing encrypted data on the cloud as a tertiary copy for critical data? Yes, when combined with disk, and tape backups (with media going offsite.) Storing data on the cloud as the primary source for backups? Too risky.

Re:Wrong concern

[Ravaldy]

Can someone explain how one gets amazing performance for the file server with cloud hosting? Replication?

For almost every single application I see the cloud being a god given gift (other than I have to convince the owners on a budget) but I can't get over the idea that file servers are much faster when local. I can't get a gig connection to a cloud service where I'm located so when those CAD guys need to access a 200mb file they won't be happy if the pipe is only 10Mbs.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud services are garbage. If the physical server is dead and is shared by some other customer, you are straight up screwed. This is why OpenStack is a joke.

Explain to me why it's OpenStacks fault that you have designed and built your infrastructure so poorly that a single server failure leaves you "straight up screwed".

Every time I see a greybeard complain about Cloud I see a horrific pile of SPOFs that are hand configured and coddled and a guy who wants to be the hero by being the only one who knows how to fix it when it breaks. Which is a fucking shitty position for any serious business to be in, and why businesses are now turning to automation and clouds to solve your crappy architecture.

Re:Wrong concern

[p51d007]

EXACTLY! The "cloud" could disappear one day, or they could hold your data hostage for whatever reason. My data, my servers...PERIOD!

Re:Wrong concern

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't put jack shit out there w/o it being encrypted.

So I copy it now, and 10 years from now, and then cannot read it til XYZ-[KEY SIZE] encryption is broken/ineffective? Or capture tons of it, and just trust I can steal the keys later.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

There are highly reputable private cloud hosting companies who are certified to handle any class of data you may have. With the right company, you may find that they are actually better at maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability than you are able to manage internally.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

but be prepared to lay down some serious ducats if you want one to do anything permanent, enterprise-sized, and/or production-like.

If you're an enterprise, you're not paying the same per-hour cost as the general public. My company spends close to $100m/yr on hosting and is switching over entirely to AWS. They're not about to make a decision like that if it's going to greatly increase prices.

Re:Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

And my reading of many cloud services break many privacy laws. The service provider can see/use the data too. Oops, SOX compliance out the window. Save one critical email to the cloud, and you are breaking the law. Customer data in the cloud? Privacy laws broken. Student or medical info in the cloud? More laws broken. Where are the SOX compliance statements from the cloud?

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

[chill]

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:Wrong concern

[rainer_d]

Have they thought about how they could get back the data from amazon, if they decided to switch back or if amazon raises prices?
If you spent 100m/y on hosting - couldn't you do that cheaper yourself?

Re:Wrong concern

[jcoy42]

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 really work in real life.

Re:Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

I think due diligence can be done with audits,

Also due diligence would be requesting to see their indemnity clause, protecting you in case their security is breached or other actions of being in "the cloud" caused some legal liability.

As I've not seen such a clause yet, no cloud provider has ever passed basic "due diligence". So anyone who brags about being on the cloud or selling the cloud is an idiot incapable of even the most basic due diligence.

Re:Wrong concern

[Rakarra]

Since no court would (or could) mandate such a requirement, and frankly no sane person should ever agree to such terms even if they were enforceable, this simply means no cloud provider even offers anything I need.

Are you purely self-employed?
If not, expect your CTO (or any thinking CxO) to roll their eyes and leave you out of their negotiations.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody might grab the server images already. We just would never know.

Re:Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

Hilariously, the laws are usually broken as well. "Customer data" must not be given to someone without authorization. But "encrypting" it doesn't remove that legal requirement. It may, for SOX, but not for other laws (SOX is more effect oriented, where you can't share something that would give a competitive advantage, and unbreakable encrypted information shouldn't affect that). So without written indemnity from a cloud provider, I wouldn't consider moving to one.

Re:Wrong concern

[snakeplissken]

crap, wrong moderation, sorry :(

Re:Wrong concern

[barc0001]

> 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: Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

Oh, and speak to a privacy expert because your "reading" of privacy law is incorrect.

Ah yes, asserting I'm wrong, without any specifics. Why not? Because you just want me to be wrong, but have no information that would indicate otherwise. Some privacy laws specify "no customer data" may be shared without explicit permission. That doesn't say "can't be shared in a usable manner" or anything like that. SOX and some of the other laws (like HIPAA and others) do specify it must not be usable, so you can upload encrypted files the cloud provider can't read. But those aren't the only secrecy laws out there.

Go on, prove me wrong. Oh wait, you (and your experts) can't, because I'm right.

If their controls are so effective, why didn't you link to one of the providers with an indemnity clause accepting legal responsibility for any breaches? Is that because nobody actually stands by their "certification" with a legal promise? Seems the "experts" at all those companies agree with me, not you. Is that the real reason you are so angry?

Re: Wrong concern

[chill]

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 show due diligence, just like in every other contract. The level of effort is frequently detailed in the law requiring compliance.

And I'm not angry.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

... and it's a lot easier for a 'disgruntled employee' to walk out the door with a key and passphrase than with TBs of data. And once that key is "out in the wild" you might well have millions of hackers with copies of your information.

Re: Wrong concern

[sphealey]

- - - - - You aren't outsourcing risk. Proper configuration, application security and the like are still YOUR responsibility. - - - - -

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:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I like my data to not be in the hands of someone else. I don't want it examined, copied or accidently Googled.

Fuck this Curtis Peterson

If there was a way to mod your post to '11', I would. Your reason above says it all. There is absolutely no reason to trust your data to anyone else but your own organization and its employees, or yourself if it's personal data. I'm sorry, but you'e an imbecile if you do.

Re:Wrong concern

[roc97007]

> 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.)

Actual quote: "Go ahead and sue. We have more lawyers than you have employees."

Re:Wrong concern

[roc97007]

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.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone whose employment is frequently pulling companies back from the cloud and getting their data back under their control, I have to agree. The cost to the company is astronomical once there is a problem especially when the data evaporates. Many many war stories about this one, but the upshot is that security and data retrieval all is a big pie in the sky when things go wrong. And that precious piece of lawyerese that you signed where they make serious commitments.. well that is not worth the paper is was signed off on when the damages are being racked up. The last was a very nice case in point where the company (unnamed) had a carefully inserted clause that gave them an out for any "act of god". Apparently floods are an "act of god" and this means that "your data? what data?" game was played, successfully I might add, until the lawyers fees reached many figures, then it switched to "oh but there are other customers data on the drives so we cannot allow you to try to recover the data" until finally they admitted that the drives had been junked and there was no way to claw it back. Cue consultants and much work to recover from partial back up etc... 6 months later and the company only retrieved about 60% of all their data. Lesson Learned! Seen the same story now 4 times, IBM Main frames, shared services, thin clients, Citrix.... nothing new under the sun, just the short memories of the boss types and the new demands for profit maximization before risk control. But then who am I kidding.... this is what keeps me employed! Power to the cloud!

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

So my choices are:
encrypt data
upload data
download data
decrypt data
or,
read data

So besides the fact that if my encrypted data is corrupted at all I'm screwed, I'm expected to either encrypt/decrypt myself (huge waste of time) or trust the cloud to do it (huge waste of time and still a security concern)? The only reasonable application is for backups. And I personally wouldn't even waste my time with that.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

If your looking at providing services to people through the "internet" then the cloud can make sense. If a majority of your IT systems are for people internal to the company, the cloud does not yet make sense. I work at a large law firm. There are SOME uses that the cloud can be a benefit. Right now for our internal systems like document management, email (Outlook), litigation support which is a bunch of unstructured data with a frontend thown in, and some Sharepoint collaboration. The could is just too damn expensive. A lot of our systems rely on each other and have heavy IO between them. Email through MS outlook 360 sounds great, lets get rid of all of our internal exchange systems and let MS handle it for $4 a user. But... our document management systems and sharepoint systems index all case emails along with all of that structured data and MS does not allow thrid party API access to those mailboxes. Our ducument management system is indexed in sharepoint, that currently takes up about 20K iops. I guess we could put the whole thing in the cloud but building enough systems to handle that 20K iops and maintain or document management system and the indexing is NOT cheap. We can buy big storage and a UCS chassis for much less. If we could get rid of all of the hooks, customization, and third party crap off of our otherwise COTS systems, the cloud might make sense. If we remove all of those plugins, third party hooks, and customization, we lose our competitive edge and productivity.

Glacier storage on Amazon for our data that has not been accessed in two years? Yes, it works great.

Ask this VOIP guy in the article that provides little bits of service to people all around the county if he had to instead provide 10000 vo-ip phones and a system to handle that to people in his own company that were housed in two physical locations somewhere in the US if using a cloud service for that would save him money. I bet it would not even come close.

Re:Wrong concern

[davidhoude]

You get what you pay for. Also while related, I don't think VPS fits directly into the cloud conversation. This would be no different then a collocation getting DOS'd

Re: Wrong concern

[mysidia]

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).

This can happen even if the server is in your main office. You need that offsite recovery plan, regardless: cloud doesn't eliminate that bit.

And a super-backup plan in case the cloud provider disappears with no forwarding address, or has all its servers confiscated by DHS.

This is no different from the previous. Just make sure your backup-backup is not with the same cloud provider; preferably, use colocated equipment in locked cages that only your company holds the keys to.

Re:Wrong concern

[mysidia]

the government grabs all the servers.

No need. Your disk I/Os and network I/Os are already being streamed to NSA HQ after any encryption removed for a quick analysis, and disney's legal department probably just bought a subscription to the feed to scan for potential infringements.

Re:Wrong concern

[mpe]

On top of that, you then require a much fatter pipe to the internet,

Also upstream bandwidth tends to be considerably more expensive than downstream. The cheapest internet connections are often asymetric with the downstream dwarfing the upstream.

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.

Several servers having multiple 1G connections to a LAN dosn't require anything especially difficult to buy off the shelf.

Re:Wrong concern

[mysidia]

As I've not seen such a clause yet, no cloud provider has ever passed basic "due diligence".

Sorry... Dell won't indemnify you if a bug in your server causes the MB to catch fire, and the thing explodes, tearing apart your datacenter.

Microsoft won't indemnify you if due to running Internet Explorer on Windows, your system is compromised, and a million credit card numbers get stolen from you, for using their software.

If your VMware cluster croaks due to a software bug or a SAN glitch, and upon inspection, the backups won't restore because some bug in the backup software caused them to become corrupt, you are sadly out of luck.

Why the heck do you think a cloud provider would indemnify you for your risks involved with using that kind of product that the cloud provider has no control over; which no server vendor cloud virtual server vendor, or physical server vendor indemnifies against?

Re:Wrong concern

[mpe]

Not to mention when Disney discovers someone on that server pirated "Steamboat Willie," the government grabs all the servers. Good luck ever seeing your data again.

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.

Re:Wrong concern

[gweihir]

No, you cannot encrypt in most situations, as in anything except archival storage or backup you need to access that data and work with it. Fully homomorphic encryption is not usable these days, and it is unclear whether it will ever be.

Re: Wrong concern

[soccerisgod]

Then you are an incompetent idiot. I even said HIPAA (properly spelled) in the post you referred to. HIPAA When you can spell it correctly, we might have considered you "familiar" with it. When you can't even spell it correctly in reply to a post that used it spelled correctly, I find it quite hard to believe anything else you say. You obviously rate your skills higher than you can demonstrate.

I have absolutely no knowledge or opinion on this whole matter, but seeing you argue like and presenting a spelling error as your main argument makes me think you are the idiot :)

Re:Wrong concern

[mjwx]

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,

Which will still be blamed on them, thus completing the job loss cycle.

Re:Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

Why the heck do you think a cloud provider would indemnify you for your risks involved with using that kind of product that the cloud provider has no control over; which no server vendor cloud virtual server vendor, or physical server vendor indemnifies against?

They wouldn't because they know their product sucks. Cisco indemnifies me against lawsuits caused by inherent use of their product (as a "user" of a patent, if Cisco's product is found to violate someone else's patent, I'm liable, unless there's some indemnification clause). So yes, I have indemnification for the hardware I use. That's an inherent liability for using an item I don't have control over, like sending sensitive data to the cloud. That you don't understand proves you incompetent. That the cloud providers don't indemnify against inherent risks of using their service proves they don't have faith in their own product. My hardware does. Your analogy fails. Quite horribly. It proves the opposite of what you assert.

Re: Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you ought to read the whole thread. chill's both wrong in fact and shows elementary incompetence. While the first has formed the bulk of the discussion, the second is fairly important too. People like this - who will happily rattle off the buzzwords for the dullards in management and ride every bandwagon - are employed throughout tech. It's a fashion show circle jerk.

Re: Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

If someone claiming to be a networking expert said he was an expert in TPC/IPX (in a context obviously meaning TCP/IP), you wouldn't take that as a good sign. Someone that can't spell something he's an "expert" in doesn't seem like much of an expert. Especially when the rest of what he's saying is no more accurate. But it drifts into "opinion" territory where I know he's wrong, but it's harder to prove, as it's closer to a personal opinion of how a federal judge would rule, should those points get litigated in court.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cloud providers are not concerned about the microsubset culture that still believes in good security, nor are they concerned about regulations around data handling. They have a large target audience left over, because the other 95% of the world could care less.

Obviously.

Re: Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yes, we should speak to a privacy "expert".

After all, along with the privacy advocates, they're doing a fucking awesome job these days...can't you tell...

Re: Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I am familiar with SOX, PCI, HIIPA, FISMA and other privacy requirements. It is my job.

Me, too... and you're dead wrong.

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.

That's exactly his point. You literally regurgitated his own argument as proof that his argument is wrong. Don't think for a minute that anyone here is dumb enough to believe you did it by chance, either.

(You CAN get indemnification clauses if you're using their services AND you pay for it.)

On paper; anyone who has dealt with privacy issues for any length of time knows that's worth two things: jack and shit. Always, always assume that you will be held accountable. It's the only intelligent approach, both morally and legally.

Re: Wrong concern

[sphealey]

Except when you do it in-house, you are paying once for the management and "risk management". When you outsource you are going to pay anywhere from 1.5x (with a good, trustworthy established outsourcing entity) to 4x or more (for a fly-by-night "cloud" vendor).

Which is better, pay less or pay more?

sPh

Re:Wrong concern

[rioki]

AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.

This is more or less what happened with Megaupload.

You forgot the politicians they payed off for the laws they use to get Megaupload in addition to the executive branches of at least 3 government. It is still quite unclear what procedures where really legal or appropriate.

Re: Wrong concern

[Rich0]

If someone claiming to be a networking expert said he was an expert in TPC/IPX (in a context obviously meaning TCP/IP), you wouldn't take that as a good sign.

I know what TCP is, but I'm sure I've posted enough stuff online that you will find a case of me writing TPC to quote me on. Call me when the guy starts going on about "tubes."

Compliance costs money no matter how you do it - having the data in-house often just means that it is easier to pretend that you're doing things right. One of the advantages of outsourcing is that you can actually get contracts with the party managing your data. When you do things in-house you can't make a contract with the IT department, because it is the same legal entity as yourself. Big companies often fall victim to their own internal cost-cutting.

Outsourcing also gives you hard costs on activities. When the work is done in-house the costs are always fuzzy - do you include the cost of the janitor that cleans the toilet the sysadmins sit on? When you outsource you pay by the whatever and your costs come in on an invoice and everybody is accountable for exactly how much they're utilizing.

At work I'm working on outsourcing of non-data-storage. In theory it isn't anything we couldn't do more efficiently in-house. The problem is that due to company culture/etc it is inevitable that if we continue to do things in-house we'll continue to do them poorly, so by outsourcing we can let somebody manage the work who will actually do it properly. I'd rather pay a bit more and ensure that things are being done right than pay less and have to deal with the issues when it turns out that they aren't.

Re:Wrong concern

[Rich0]

And since I shouldn't store the keys in the cloud, for every instance that uses some encrypted disk, I need to manually login then provide the key and passphrase.

Encrypting the storage only works if the processing is all done outside of the cloud. The instant you type your passphrase into the cloud server the cloud provider knows what it is if they want to know it. They aren't limited to reading data stored on disk.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want to use "the cloud", you can always encrypt stuff you put in it.

That works for storage, but not for computation. Aside from backups, I'm not sure what the point is of putting your storage at the end of a slow and latent pipe.

Re:Wrong concern

[deadweight]

We shot down a cloud vendor in exactly this way. "Hey Mr. Cloud - say another user of your cloud service turns out to be a front for Al Queda or maybe runs a kiddy-porn ring. How exactly do you keep the CIA/NSA/FBI off our part of the shared resources?" The blank look was priceless LOL

Re:Wrong concern

[LWATCDR]

Good points. The other issue is bandwidth. Not every location happens to have great internet bandwidth and very few have the bandwidth that you get with GigE and a switch in house.

Re:Wrong concern

[X0563511]

Or you could investigate stuff like this.

Re:Wrong concern

[X0563511]

Yea, just don't tell anyone that it's not doing anything and it's still there because nobody knows anything about it.

Re:Wrong concern

[barc0001]

>You get what you pay for.

If this is supposed to be some dig against going with little cloud services and then being surprised by outages, please share your thoughts on Amazon's EBS outages that have taken many of the highest trafficked services online out 3 times in the last 2 years. Or Microsoft's multple cloud service failures that have dragged things to a halt at many businesses using Office online. Or look to Slashdot's own front page yesterday and today to see coverage of Adobe's Creative Cloud service being offline for 28 hours.

> I don't think VPS fits directly into the cloud conversation

VPS's are considered cloud, you're virtualizing hardware and paying someone else to maintain those VMs on their infrastructure with (supposedly) no need to concern yourself with the maintenance of that underlying hardware or network infrastructure. How is that not cloud? I brought my experience with one provider up because it falls into those parameters.

>This would be no different then a collocation getting DOS'd

Ah, but it is. Firstly, most cloud providers are co-locating within another facility themselves instead of owning the place. Secondly and most importantly, if my co-location provider has a spectacular failure of some sort, I still have the option of going down to the datacenter with my truck and loading all *my* servers into the back then going across the street to another co-lo. With cloud providers, they're hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and you don't own anything in their facilities so you have no recourse unless you have local backups of everything to start elsewhere (which you should). And even if you have backups, I would be willing to bet you don't have bare-metal VM copies so you'll be provisioning new VMs and installing your application(s) and then restoring backups, which is a far more involved process than re-racking and assigning new IPs to a machine.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

9.999% has more nines than 99.9%

Re: Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

The biggest problem I find with outsourcing is that the answers are predictable, even without knowing much about the problem. That indicates to me that the consultants don't know what they are doing. And yes, I've been on both sides, and I've not seen anything on either side to change my mind.

Call a mongoose salesman and tell him that you have a snake problem in your garden. I'm sure he'll recommend a number of traps, poisons, and fencing options that will optimally solve your problem. Or he'll just try to sell you some mongooses.

That's what consultants do. Calling someone who provides outsourcing and asking them if you should outsource will get the same answer every time.

Re:Wrong concern

[psyclone]

Homomorphic encryption has been the Holy Grail of cloud computing since the term was coined. Yet until it has large toolchain support, why suffer with the extra hassle?

Re:Wrong concern

[davidhoude]

In my experience, the difference between VPS and cloud is the orchestration system. Cloud usually means that the customer can create and launch instances at will, while VPS need to be created by a human before releasing to the customer.

Re:Wrong concern

[putaro]

Have you ever really looked at what cloud services provide? You would like to believe that if a physical server at Amazon goes down that you're just fine - the fact is that no, you're probably pretty screwed. Even worse if they lose an "availability zone". And those are just hardware failures. Just wait until they f-up a software release. When I spec'd data centers we would typically require at least two different carriers with no common points of failures for internet connectivity. Are you doing that with your cloud providers?

Cloud services are not as robust as they are portrayed to be. In order to reach that level of robustness you need to engineer your applications to fail-over between servers and availability zone and even cloud service providers.

Re: Wrong concern

[Rich0]

That's what consultants do. Calling someone who provides outsourcing and asking them if you should outsource will get the same answer every time.

No argument there. I think companies are WAY too dependent on consulting services. I can see why a small business might need to engage them, but a large business that needs to hire a lot of consultants is probably mismanaged.

I'm not talking about bringing in somebody to assist with a project. I'm talking about bringing in people who you'll basically depend on to figure out what the heck you ought to be doing.

Re:Wrong concern

[putaro]

Large enterprise customers tend to buy "enterprise" grade hardware. Which, these days, is mostly just a fancy case with a label stuck on the front and a warranty. Amazon doesn't run expensive hardware, they run cheap hardware, and mark it up enough as a "cloud service" to make a good profit but still undercut the expensive hardware vendors. Essentially, you're paying Amazon for a warranty. If you're spending $100M/year on hosting you should be able to run your own cloud for less than AWS charges you but in order to do that you need to let go of the enterprise vendor security blanket.

Re: Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

It wasn't until I was a consultant, coming in behind other consultants until I realized how unscrupulous some consultants are. The biggest mutterers of "core competency" are consultants (financial and marketing ones first). Note, the "security expert" (likely a consultant) who couldn't even spell the regulations he deals with regularly correctly hasn't spoken up since it was pointed out he doesn't know what he's doing.

I worked for a company that was losing $2,000,000 a year, and they called in PWC, and paid about $1,000,000 to have PWC tell them they weren't profitable. Sometimes it just boggles the mind.

Re: Wrong concern

[Rich0]

Yup. I could see a new CEO coming in to a screwed-up company and bringing in a few consultants to help him straighten it out, but the goal would be to fire the folks who should be doing the job the consultants had to do, and replace them with somebody competent so that you don't need the consultants.

Big companies shouldn't have huge gaps in skills in anything they do. Sure, I buy the core competencies thing to an extent, but I've seen gross mismanagement basically go ignored. I don't care if records storage isn't your profit-making center - if you have more than 10k employees you can afford to at least have one person in charge of your records storage dept that knows how to do their job. The only thing big companies have going for them is their economy of scale, and yet so often they don't want to embrace that.

I think the reason for half of the outsourcing arrangements out there is that a company hopes that by outsourcing something and having real charge-backs that people will just stop using the service entirely. They don't want to deal with the culture problems that create all the waste in the first place, so they just add more waste on top of it. I'm working on a storage-related project at work and it is almost impossible to get people to realize that if they never actually use something they don't need to store it (no legal requirements here - they just store stuff because they spent a lot of money making it in the first place, and I'm not talking about data that costs $100/TB/year - I'm talking about stuff that has mass and takes up space and often needs special handling).

Re: Wrong concern

[AK Marc]

I think the reason for half of the outsourcing arrangements out there is that a company hopes that by outsourcing something and having real charge-backs that people will just stop using the service entirely.

The number one reason I've seen mass outsourcing is when the accounting spreads the cost of doing business unequally. The two $50k IT employees cost the company $1,000,000 a year because the server room is big, and we allocate corporate costs based on floorspace. Or accounting managed to make themselves a revenue generator by charging 20% than their actual cost, and distributing it around the company. What's great is nobody recognizes the problem (finance over charges) but sees the other cost centers as losing more than they do, so out they go. Then, when you are left with sales and finance as the only two groups, finance over-charges sales, and they complains, someone notices, and re-balances the numbers. Then they realize they were paying less for IT before they outsourced it, then bring it back inside, with people who have no experience with the systems. The "experts" all moved on.

It's insane that I've seen that happen more than once. Poor actions by another group to make themselves invaluable causes execs to be dumb.

Re:Wrong concern

[barc0001]

I think you need to have another look at VPS. It's been the case for several years now that you sign up for an account, pay for what you want and then an automated deployment system allows you to spin up a brand new VPS with your choice of sizing and OS all in about 60 seconds. Digital Ocean even lets you just throw some cash in your balance and then charges you per day so you can spin up and shut down as many VPSs as you like with whatever capacity you have the credit for on that day.

Re:Wrong concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a one time pad. No information is stored in either the plain text or the cypher. Good enough for mathematics, good enough for the law, right?

Re: Wrong concern

[Rich0]

No argument there. I work for a big company and I'm amazed at the amount of waste that basically amounts to externalizes and other accounting incentives.

Cloud needs server huggers

[chiefcrash]

Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere down the line someone needs to be running a generator.
If you have specific requirements in terms of availability of electricity then it seems like a pretty good idea to have some of your own generators.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[i kan reed]

And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[afidel]

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.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[i kan reed]

I wasn't saying it was never necessary. Just that "Someone needs to" is a far cry from "I need to"

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as a former Ring Central customer, I would have to guess that they did in fact throw away all their servers, and run their shitty product on 2 toasters and a netbook.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Having done support for dozens of law firms over the years, 90+% of them have UPS battery backups to run their servers and network gear for a few hours. Its not a generator, but its juice enough to bridge the small outages and gracefully shut down if there are power issues.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[kimvette]

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:Cloud needs server huggers

[Arker]

"And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no."

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:Cloud needs server huggers

[shaitand]

Which is fine given the lack of any presented argument against running your own generator (or server).

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 the cloud" is nothing more or less than virtualizing servers in a datacenter. A company can do that for themselves. Using a cloud service does nothing more or less than outsource some of your rack and stack jobs and virtualization platform administration. Which probably isn't saving much since said services have to have that staff and pay them and recoup the cost plus a profit from what they charge you and it is definitely handing complete and total access to your systems and data to a third party.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[i kan reed]

You're talking about the physical components versus the software components.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[humphrm]

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:Cloud needs server huggers

[CastrTroy]

There seems to be a decent inbetween stage in the world of servers though. With servers, there's 4 options. You can own the datacenter. You can own the servers and rent out space in a datacenter. You can rent out servers inside a datacenter owned by someone else, You can host your applications on virtual machines that run inside somebody else's datacenter. Each level gives you less control over the services. If you own the datacenter, you're responsible for everything. If you only have a single server, this is a bad idea because there's a lot of infrastructure you have to buy to support that one small machine (generators, batter backup, air conditioning, fire suppression, etc). If you have 10,000 servers it's a great idea. Personally, I don't understand what one really gets out of using a service like Amazon where you have virtual machines or even renting machines, versus just using your own machines in someone else's datacenter. Unless you have a very niche case where you frequently need different numbers of machines, then there is no reason to use this method.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[fahrbot-bot]

Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?

Obviously, it's Turtles all the way down.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[PaddyM]

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 koopas all the way up for cloud computing.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[edibobb]

No, electricity is a bunch of electrons. Stop hugging the electrons and they won't be so excited!

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Catbeller]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/908/

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you happen to be a hospital.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's turtles all the way down, and clouds all the way up.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[NotSanguine]

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.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Karmashock]

Your point ignores the fact that people are increasingly switching to self power generation... solar power... wind... and yes... lots of off grid diesel generators.

The instant we have a reasonable power storage self power generation will explode.

So your argument is self defeating. People want to move to self generation.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.

Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read them. When you hug your server, you just get wet, and the NSA get cross with you.

The cloud is a magic place of infinite storage and bandwidth, and unicorns. Its the dreamland where all of the apps come from. You should hug the cloud.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[retchdog]

a lot of people have that very niche case and amazon was the first i know of to effectively satisfy it. i usually need 0 machines (of substantial power), but occasionally could use a few, so paying $2.80/hr. for a 244GB machine is pretty damned convenient. likewise i could play with a decent CUDA machine for $0.65/hr. if i ever came up with an idea to try out. assuming i use a simulator/emulator for development and preliminary eval, then 50 hours should be way more than enough, which is ~$30. peanuts.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[cheesybagel]

That's the whole idea behind Amazon. What you pay scales with your installed user base. As for other similar applications it is because the costs of a virtual server are cheaper than renting a whole machine for rather obvious reasons.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Vanders]

Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?

As a former cloud administrator: no. When you have 2000 physical servers, why do you care that 50 of them are currently broken? Why would I care that the hard drive failed in one and I had to re-install it (with an identical image and configuration to the other 1999 servers)

Hell, we had servers that never worked from the day they were delivered and no one gave a shit: it went on the backlog for the DC guys to diagnose and RMA. Some of them got fixed after 6 months.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[mlts]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a lawyer, damaging access to a physical document isn't less damaging than access to a photocopy of a physicial document, or for that matter an electronic copy of a physical document.

In fact, if the physical document is destroyed but the electronic copy isn't, assuming access to the physical document would have been damaging, access to the electronic copy would still be damaging even if the physical document doesn't exist!

To take it to it's logical end, you don't need the physical document to be controlled. You need the data to be controlled. If access to the data is damaging, access to copies of the data in any form is damaging.

I'd love to see the lawer who wants to wants to keep a document (like their court strategy) private but is willing to distribute photocopies freely, with the expectation that the information is still private. Unfortuantely, Lawyers are not generally dumb. Occasionally they'll play dumb, or they'll stand up a dumb argument as their best course going forward, but it does take _something_ to get through law school, pass the bar, and remain employed.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree with this. We received a request to move everything to "GoDaddy cloud" because they googled somewhere that godaddy is cloud and if it's cloud it works.
Also when their flash updates pop up on the screen and a pop up comes up with "Would you like to install Ask Toolbar?" and all those ads questions... Yes Yes yes yes! ....
Sooo ... with lawyers, you have to hold their hands in EVERYTHING technology, especially data.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[SecurityGuy]

This is actually pretty insightful. Yes, many, many people shouldn't be running their own generators. I can get a 20kW generator from the local home depot for $5,000, but it's probably not meant to run forever. I imagine one that is meant to deliver 20kW constantly costs more. And you have to fuel it. And hire someone to come fix it when it breaks. Clearly, that's a bad idea.

What if you already own a power company? What if you've already made the investment in generators and people who know how to run them? What if the cost of your operation is less than the power vendors (once you cut through all the hype)? What if you count the cost you'd incur by dismantling your expensive operation only to realize a few years later that you're actually spending more now and you have to go buy a bunch of generators and hire a bunch of people who know how to run them again, just to get where you started?

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention that the court isn't going to give a fuck if you lost power and you can't file your documents on time.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooooo, a cloud middle man. I smell a business opportunity.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[gweihir]

Electricity is generic. Data, software and their use are not.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[sjames]

It's clouds all the way down!

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit being an attention whore. Use the same font as everyone else.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[SuricouRaven]

The (largely theoretical) cost savings come from utilisation. If you run the servers, you need to have peak capacity on hand - your website needs to be ready to handle being linked to from slashdot or a major news site, your fileservers need to be up to the task of everyone logging on in the morning, and you need enough storage always to hand to be ready when that guy down in PR starts work on his 1080p raw video for the new advertisment project. That means that most of the time your servers are sitting largely idle. With a cloud setup, the operator can rely on few of those peaks coinciding between customers - allowing for servers to be run closer to full utilization, and thus reducing the number of servers needed in total.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, software doesn't work very well without hardware.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, for development and research, I agree, they have their uses. It's nice to be able to rent a high power machine for a few hours to test out some stuff, or run some simulations. But for day to day production machines, hosting web applications that don't actually have load that is variable, I really don't see the point, at yet I see plenty of companies doing it.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[i kan reed]

Software these days works fucking awesome without particular hardware. Virtually every language is multiplatform.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[retchdog]

it's probably a reason (excuse?) to fire someone who was being paid too much in the first place. $90k/year (or however much a server monkey costs) will buy a lot of ec2 hours, plus the healthcare and payroll taxes are a lot cheaper.

yeah, it might not be cost-effective in the long run (then again, it might) but who cares? they certainly don't.

on a less serious note, maybe the spot-pricing works out? not for the frontend of course, but it may be reasonable for some applications. i don't know, i never used it.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[bhiestand]

Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.

SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

10Gbps gets saturated pretty quick when an ntp DDOS hits random cloud customer.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Look at it from a manager's perspective. It looks a lot better to blame something on a third party system outage than to say "The server my team manages went down". Then you just take the money saved from moving "to the cloud" and use it to justify your next request for a pay increase.

Re:Cloud needs server huggers

[shaitand]

I didn't know we were talking about mom and pop shops. They don't have storage and network admins because they don't have significant storage and network architecture to admin. But even in the ultra tiny shops where the IT staff are outside consultants they should have restricted physical access to your server(s).

It's one thing to have someone in to work on the system you run your accounting on. It's quite another to not only put that system on the internet but give 24/7 physical access to a third party. Security aside, the person who would suggest putting your local windows based file, print, and SSO on the cloud is a moron. Those services aren't intended for anything but local access and choke pretty hard over wan links without wan accelerators that cost more than a mom and pop shops entire IT infrastructure. Even if you had the wan accelerators to work around the latency, LAN links are going to be dramatically faster and less expensive for said mom and pop shop.

You are still going to need your workstations. You are still going to need switching/routing for them. And in shops that size your servers just plug in to a port on the same stuff so you aren't going to cut back on network infrastructure going to the cloud. What you are going to do is more heavily saturate your already slow WAN link.

Who the hell cares?

[neiras]

What's next, Slashdot - "One Weird Trick That Clouds Your Cloudy Cloud Cloud?" ...back to SoylentNews.

All I can say to that is...

[Anonymous Coward]

who?

Re:All I can say to that is...

[Mr. Freeman]

Who? Why, he's the person selling the product that he says everyone needs, of course! After all, he's a salesman, there's no way he would intentionally mislead anyone, right?

Seriously though, this guy is just trying to sell a product by insulting everyone who doesn't buy it. He's coined a derogatory term in order to try and label everyone who doesn't buy his product as being a "server hugger." How about we make our own stupid name and call people like him "airheads"? An airhead is someone who thinks that the cloud is the end-all be-all of IT infrastructure. Airheads ignore the problems inherent with the cloud, dodge the hard questions, and insist that running your own machines is always, without question, a bad thing to do.

Curtis Peterson, you're an airhead.

Re:All I can say to that is...

[gweihir]

Indeed. And this person does not care how much damage he does as long as he has a profit. So I will call him unethical in addition.

Excersise for the reader:

[xlsior]

Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing. Yes, you gain some flexibility, but you lose a LOT of control. Case in point: gamespy's recent announcement that they're closing up shop, and all of a sudden hundreds of major games from big-name software houses will lose their online multiplayer abilities. How's 'the cloud' working out for them?

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[zdzichu]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

This post sums up the BS spewed by the schmuck quoted in the article. Let's move on.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[i kan reed]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server"

This.

My company's proprietary data is never going onto someone else's remote server. Ever.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a valid comparison. Gamespy provided a specialized service which had nothing to do with the cloud.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

I just replace the word cloud with server.
It makes the whole summary hilarious.
Maybe this guy thinks all the computation is just being done in some magic interaction between all the switches that make up the internet.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[mwvdlee]

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:

[mpe]

Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing.

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:

[tysonedwards]

You mean, they provided distributed, off-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service to other vendors in exchange for money so that said vendors wouldn't need to do handle multiplayer gaming server infrastructure themselves?

Yeah... totally different from "the cloud". What was the OP thinking?

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[mwvdlee]

And here it is: https://github.com/panicsteve/...

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Kremmy]

Absolutely a valid comparison. GameSpy provided cloud-hosted services to video game developers. They recently stopped providing those cloud-hosted services. The only way you could possibly think it has nothing to do with the cloud is by having no understanding of what makes a cloud.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a Chromium extension replacing all occurences of ”in my butt” by ”in my butt”. Conveys the same message.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[sconeu]

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:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: gamespy's recent announcement that they're closing up shop, and all of a sudden hundreds of major games from big-name software houses will lose their online multiplayer abilities.

That's not a bug; it's a feature. The game companies get to throw up their hands and blame the cloud. They save money and dodge the bad PR. Oh, and they sell more new games too.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[khasim]

Use "the cloud" and in addition to the LAN you need connectivity between your LAN and where ever the server might actually be.

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new Butt Computing overlords.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get out the old Playstation 1 and see what my old friend Butt Strife is up to.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Threni]

> 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:Excersise for the reader:

[frank_adrian314159]

I don't get it. I don't understand what this has to do with anything:

There's a Chromium extension replacing all occurences [sic] of "in my butt" by "in my butt". Conveys the same message.

I understand the tautology stated here, but is there some deeper meaning? Can someone please explain?

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[freeze128]

Quick, install this extension on all the browsers of your executives....

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know...the phrase "butt hugger" immediately sprang unbidden into my mind and I must admit I did smile.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

I replace the word "cloud" with mainframe. 'Cause that's what a mainframe is.

No. It's what you might think a mainframe is if you've never seen a mainframe, never used a cloud, and you're a complete simpleton.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

You got it correct. Nothing to see here.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Lehk228]

damned kids, back in my day we called it 'shared hosting'

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[AK Marc]

I've never "used" a mainframe. I used a terminal to remotely control a mainframe. I don't know where the cloud mainframe was, but I remotely controlled it. I've seen a cloud. It was a server. One was even an actual mainframe. IBM still sells "cloud" services on actual mainframes.

A cloud is a computer. You can run your home PC as a "cloud" (people that play WoW on their tablets through remotely controlling their computer are "cloud computing").

Mainframes were the original "cloud". A cloud is a computer (or group of computers). Yes, I know now people think that a cluster of computers, virtualized is somehow different than a mainframe. Denial doesn't make it true.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

Never attribute to stupidity what may be attributed to malice.
Marketeers are not complete retards. They'd just like us all to be, though, so they can sell us things more easily.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

With the extension enabled, the tautology version is how the original post would appear in Chromium.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[LihTox]

Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing.

I'm not an IT professional by any means, but to me that doesn't seem quite fair. Ideally, the server is being run by somebody with the resources and expertise to keep the server running better than you can yourself. It seems reasonable to me that this is the sort of thing that might benefit from outsourcing, if you're an individual or a small company, and so long as you take precautions.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you have a case of being "hurt in the cloud".

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think all marketeers are stupid, you have already lost.

Your life will be filled with things you only own because marketeers have convinced you you want them.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[SuricouRaven]

It was the cloud before someone invented the term.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but we should help those who don't know how to use a Venn diagram and may assume the converse. I have known a few retards who have morals and thus not all retards are filthy, lying, marketeers.

Re:Excersise for the reader:

[Anonymous Coward]

replacing all occurences of ”in my butt” by ”in my butt”

way ahead of you

not news

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking News! Someone selling cloud services says anyone not using his type of product is backwards. Details at 11.

Re:not news

[HideyoshiJP]

I won't be able to watch it. My IPTV service is down. :(

It's a matter of trust

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA killed cloud computing.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[kthreadd]

No they didn't, cloud computing is definitly a big thing even after we learned that the NSA is doing more less what they are supposed to do.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[Anonymous Coward]

They did kill it for potential users outside of the US. These raging capitalist idiots always trying to sell some service instead of just taking care of their own. I really am starting to dislike western, capitalist culture more and more. I cannot turn the damned corner without some douchebag trying to sell me something.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[kthreadd]

What's so specific about the US? I really don't understand why cloud computing would be dead for people outside the US.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[rogoshen1]

or figuring out ways to sell your eyeballs out from under you :(

Re:It's a matter of trust

[Anonymous Coward]

It's dead for non-Americans who once desired to use American-based "cloud" services. They no longer trust American companies.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[JohnFen]

They killed it for me. They proved that the cloud cannot be trusted.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[kthreadd]

So what you're saying is that cloud services only exist in the US?

Re:It's a matter of trust

[Morpf]

All the big players in cloud services are US corporations.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[AK Marc]

No, he said that non-US companies won't deal with US companies for cloud services.

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberal...Conservative...Indpendent...Marxest...Socialist...Communist... ;-)

Re:Yeah...

[fonske]

French saying: "On n'est jamais mieux servi que par soi-même"

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as soon as I can trust you to operate a server with my customers' (and my) proprietary data without fucking up.

Right now, my uptime has more nines than Amazon.

Also HIPAA, SOX, EU privacy laws blah blah blah

Great idea!

[ZorinLynx]

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:Great idea!

[Catbeller]

The decision will be made by MBAs. Sanity has little to do with it.

Re:Great idea!

[Richard Elmore]

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 (modes of transportation where control has been handed over to someone else) are all substantially safer than travel by car (where you are in control). I know that you can slice and dice these numbers different ways (e.g. deaths/journey or deaths/hour) and get somewhat different results but even when looked at in those ways bus and rail are still _always_ safer than car travel so, in this case at least, being in control does not improve safety.

I'm not saying that the cloud is the right solution for everything but I would really like to see more data on how up-time for cloud based services compares to on premise solutions before jumping to any conclusions.

Re:Great idea!

[Ksevio]

"Placing control of your mission-critical infrastructure in the hands of others" is great when you're a small business and the "others" are people that maintain servers for a living and have datacenter resources. For some companies having in-house servers is useful, especially if they have the staff to maintain them. For the companies with just email and a website, maybe an FTP too, they don't need the hassle of setting up servers and keeping them updated and making sure they have reliable power/internet servic and keeping spare parts around in case something fails.

It's great to be able to "DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT" when something fails, but not so great when that something is "go out and buy a new server because of a gutter getting clogged".

Re:Great idea!

[bhiestand]

I'm not saying that the cloud is the right solution for everything but I would really like to see more data on how up-time for cloud based services compares to on premise solutions before jumping to any conclusions.

You're right to wonder that. Unfortunately, I can't exactly share my data, but I do have a pretty large [non-random] sample size. Companies that are too small to have dedicated, competent storage and mail server admins have far higher uptime with reputable cloud providers. So far around an order of magnitude.

For every "omg, AWS region was down for an hour!" slashdot story, I've seen at least two businesses lose data on poorly architected storage that was not properly backed up or maintained.

For every "omg, Gmail/Office365 was down for an hour!" story, I've seen a company down for a week because their in-house Exchange server died or suffer constant outages because they used a cheap hosted Exchange solution.

If you can't afford to do it right, with a DR site, on- and off-site backups, and physically redundant systems, managed by competent admins, you are probably better off with a major cloud service.

It's Called Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not move to the "Cloud" because the price for the bandwidth negates any advantage. Besides, I am still not sold on security. Letting a "third party" have all of our financials and records just makes me cringe. So... yeah, I am a server hugger and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Prick.

Re:It's Called Bandwidth

[mpe]

I do not move to the "Cloud" because the price for the bandwidth negates any advantage.

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.

That's not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look a condescending dickbag who labels people who don't buy into his business model.

Fuck you Dice, fuck you and your sponsors.

Re:That's not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I was coming on here to say something like the parent, but instead the 'Return to classic mode' button DOESN'T APPEAR TO BE WORKING.

Double Fuck you, Dice. Beta is a piece of shit, stop sending me over to it randomly.

p.s. Chrome hates the FUCK outta that banner, too.

Re:That's not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look a condescending dickbag who labels people who don't buy into his business model.

Fuck you Dice, fuck you and your sponsors.

I can't improve upon this comment, took the words out of my mouth.

Re:That's not surprising

[rubycodez]

hey hey now, they provided you with Slashdot Beta, a purely cloud based service

Slashdot, you drunk. Go home!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ad disguised as a troll. These are getting more common here.

Cloud, schmoud!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Cloud, schmoud!

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a hypervisor on my EC2 instance and sell that to other people who do the same, you insensitive clod!

Re:Cloud, schmoud!

[CaptSlaq]

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...

cough cough adobe, cloud, ...

[TobinLathrop]

I hate this everything can be in the 'cloud' well no not everything can or should be as seen by todays lack of productivity for users who can't authenticate with Adobe.

Adobe Creative Cloud

[prestonmichaelh]

Has anyone checked out Adobe Creative Cloud in the last day or two?

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

[QuietLagoon]

You mean this: Adobe Creative Cloud suffering extended outage

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[QilessQi]

It's Adobe's fault for hugging their cloud servers instead of putting them in the cloud....

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory xkcd

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

We heard that you like the cloud, so we put your cloud in the cloud, so that you can cloud while you cloud!

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Atticka]

Beat me to it!

Now we have to deal with peer pressure in the datacenter! Dirty cloud huggers!

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe are still around?

I jest, but since their switch to 'the cloud' and the lack of yearly 'CS' updates on the pirate sites I've seen a lot of people simply assuming they died and moving on to other software that is being updated in their eyes.

Cloud services are more 'invisible' too.

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

My pirated copy of CS6 is working just fine Adobe. :-P

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud

[Rich0]

How is moving everything to the cloud working out for those users?

About as well as things work out for my relatives when they have a hard drive fail without backups. Well, except that the users of the cloud get their data back in a few hours 99% of the time.

I can't say that applications at my workplace which has a professionally-managed datacenter are any more reliable than the typical cloud service. You just don't hear about it on the news when things go down there.

Sure, you and I know how to backup our data, but we're the exception. And for my data which is fairly critical, where do I back it up? Well, that would be on Amazon S3. This way I know that if my house burns down the last backup is always only a few hours old, and not from the last time I grabbed my disks and moved them offsite. And where do I back up my data on Google Drive or Amazon or Dropbox? Well, that would be my PC. If Amazon and my house both have a major catastrophe at the same time I'll be screwed, but chances are in that case I'll have to live in my basement until the fallout cools down.

Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, let's give google/dropbox/whoever access to all my personal private data.

Yea' sure..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I can depend on the internet ALWAYS working.
I can depend on the 'cloud' server farm to ALWAYS be up.
They will always be cheaper than my own server.
They won't ever increase their prices.
They will never ever submit to a NSA/FBI/CIA 'request' without telling me.

Oh, and the internet NEVER breaks. Did I mention that?
There are never backhoes digging where they shouldn't and drunk drivers never crash into the wrong pole.
My business that needs systems to always work internally never needs to worry because the internet always works.. yea' right.

Re:Yea' sure..

[mpe]

There are never backhoes digging where they shouldn't and drunk drivers never crash into the wrong pole.

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.

Unless your app needs more than 4 GB of RAM...

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM in the cloud is still expensive, as simple as that.

Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[davecb]

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.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Anonymous Coward]

The company still has to pay a sysadmin, if they don't then who does the CEO fire when the cloud is down?

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Catbeller]

And bosses love employees who live in terror of losing their jobs at any time. Keeps the complaints and wages down. And you still get to sack them, in the end. And get a bonus and a raise.

The problems which ensue are the cloud company's problem, so win-win-win-win for the MBAs.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Catbeller]

No one. But the blame isn't the CEO's, which is all that matters.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a job where we leased our server...because after 5-7 years the lease would be up and we could lease new hardware. If we owned the hardware the PHB would go well it still runs...why do we need a new server. Also, the PHB thought the lease cost less because the monthly payments were lower...

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Anonymous Coward]

He fires the sysadmin, shows the improved profits, and then finds a buyer before the chickens come home to roost.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Rakarra]

Not if the company doesn't have to pay for a sysadmin anymore...

But they're paying a hell of a lot more in Cloud fees. Those add up quickly.
And best of all, the cloud admins don't work for you and don't particularly care about whether one of the dozens of companys' servers they manage are having trouble.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

I for one take my advice from the rich and sucessful. They ought to know what they are talking about, or else they wouldn't be rich and sucessful, right? So on the topic on leasing, we have Felix Dennis, good for a billion or so. He says:

"If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent. It’s cheaper in the long run."

So taking his comment into account and applying it to yours, I guess it means renting server hardware is the way to go, unless you storn p0rn on them?

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY! CxO's think in terms of quarterly reports. So, the quarterly expense for putting the company's valuable data on someone else's servers looks a hell of a lot lower than the one-time cost of buying a new server (that they've refused to replace for ten years). It doesn't matter that the aggregate cost of the service over five years is twice a new server, all that matters is that almighty quarterly report and their personal bonuses. The long-term good of the company and the employees be damned.

Re:Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[MooseMiester]

It's only cheaper if you need a temporary instance for a few hours, or weeks.

I have yet to find a single cloud provider who at the end of it all doesn't charge double for the same thing I get with hardware I own sitting in someone Else's leased rack. If I was crazy enough to have a closet in the office full of servers - with a window rattler A/C and my own pipe this might not be true but who actually hosts web sites on this kind of configuration anymore?

When COLO rack space with a terabyte of outbound bandwidth is $50/u per month, and a shiny new insanely powerful server with a 3-4 year minimum service life is around six grand why on earth would I pay Amazon EC2 $800 a month just to say "I am in the cloud"

No matter how much you try

[Lumpio-]

And no matter how much marketing jargon you spew at people, "the cloud" is still just a bunch of servers. Stop lying.

Cloud is a Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you need to dynamically scale up and scale down dozens or hundreds of servers on a per-day or per-week basis, cloud servers are a scam. It's wwwayyyy cheaper to lease or co-locate physical servers. And for the low-end (which is most people!), there's still regular VPS.

Just compare the price of running a single cloud image 24/7 for a month to leasing physical hardware. It comes out to roughly the same cost, but you're getting far fewer resources. You could lease a server for the same price and run a bunch of KVM instances on it.

And of course, VPS is still cheaper by a large margin.

The "cloud" premium is money you spend stroking your own ego. Small and medium sized businesses get to pretend that when they need to scale like the really big guys, it'll be easy. But 1) it won't happen, 2) it wouldn't be easy, and 3) why are you throwing all that money away, again?

Re:Cloud is a Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Just compare the price of running a single cloud image 24/7 for a month to leasing physical hardware. It comes out to roughly the same cost, but you're getting far fewer resources. You could lease a server for the same price and run a bunch of KVM instances on it.

Let me just check...no, no, my Digital Ocean Droplet that costs me a whole $10 a month is cheaper than a shitty VPS, and I get way more bandwidth too. It's been up for 7 months at this point. What a scam!

Re:Cloud is a Scam

[AK Marc]

Your service *is* a VPS. That you don't know the difference doesn't make it true.

Re:Cloud is a Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah! So a cloud compute instance is a VPS when a poster on Slashdot says it's a VPS. Gotcha.

If only we had a word for "Large scale distributed hypervisor platform for rapidly deploying many virtual private servers". It'd have to be a big, round, word. Like..."Owd", "Oood"..."Loud"...."Cloud"! Yeah, "Cloud"! That sounds good, don't you think?

Re:Cloud is a Scam

[AK Marc]

No, it is when the provider says it is and sells it as such.

Obligatory Blackadder

[QilessQi]

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

[parlancex]

There's never been a better time to get into the cloud! Get all your data into your favorites service(s) just in time for your ISP to hold it hostage from your cloud service providers.

Double speek and spin-doctoring

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing is a giant spin-doctored work. As others have pointed out, "Cloud" is just "Someone else server", and " This is a huge opportunity to improve their skill set and to grow in their career and become even more valuable." is a euphemism for "You're fired." (This is often on the form letter for exit interviews)

Immanual Kant in his book Ethics points out a solid test for determining if this is a good idea - take it to the logical extreme and see if it still holds up as a good idea. What's the extreme in this case? That EVERYONE and EVERYTHING uses "Somebody else server" ... then ... who has any servers? No one. Because the server company needs to use somebody else server anyways.

Oh well, good luck with the ad hominem marketing. I'm sure many pointey-haired admins will fall for it.

Cloud-based services company exec shills for cloud

[swb]

...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

[jtownatpunk.net]

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 departments (and entire companies) to maintain their computing resources so we're rolling it all back to the 70s. I guess in a couple decades, people will be complaining about how they're tired of The Cloud deciding what software they can use and there will be a push to bring computing power back to the departments and individual companies.

Re:What's old is new

[MrLeap]

"Manage your own onsite cloud!"
You mean.. a server?
"It's the clouuuuuuud"

Re:What's old is new

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, by then, there will be plenty of obstacles, both legal and practicle, preventing you from doing so at any but the highest (expense) level.

As long as we have data caps, I won't be using the cloud. When I want to access something, ignoring the cost of cloud services, why should I pay for it twice?

Data Ownership

[HeyBob!]

If you don't own your server, you don't own your data.

Re:Data Ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud = your data pwn3d

Re:Data Ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

The "cloud" business model: "GIve us your data and we'll lease you access to it" (as long as you pay your bills). It works for us because we get your money, it works for you because.........because.... CLOUD!

Am i the only one who searched his name on Google?

[kunyo]

Maybe i'm completely wrong but i think he's just market making for his company which sells CLOUD phone systems.

The first rule of computer security...

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:The first rule of computer security...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some places where an external cloud does not make sense:
1. Security/privacy related industries (see US DOD, healthcare, etc.)
2. Companies that are big enough to have their own infrastructure team
3. When small businesses with a decent tech hire only need ~1 box (mom & pop type shops).
4. When you need the speed that on location offers (see HFT)

There are some places where an external cloud does make sense:
1. Businesses with high volatility (see startups like whatsapp)
2. Companies who need more server capacity than they can physically manage with local staff/facilities.
3. When there's little need for absolute confidence in data security.
4. When you can't afford enterprise pricing and have outgrown mom & pop status (similar to #2)

It's pretty clear to me, but does take a case by case for each company. Also, there's a lot of opportunity for larger companies to dual-wield their "cloud" technologies. using internal for security and external for scalability tied through a VPS or some such. whatever fits for each company though, as a business you better have off-site backups of any critical data.

Re:The first rule of computer security...

[Karmashock]

In regards to businesses where an external cloud does make sense.

1. Businesses with high volatility should still at they very least own the code that is the basis of their service and be able to replicate it should their host become unreliable. One of the larger problems with external clouds is that they are more then hosts. They often have propretary closed source software that their whole service is based upon. If you contract with them and then later have a problem you are FUCKED because you cannot migrate to an internal host or migrate to a competing external host without completely recoding your whole system.

This is one of the reasons companies like to sell these services because they create customer lock in. Once a business starts using your system they become a captive asset that will likely remain a customer for a long time even if they start to dislike your service because the cost of migrating is simply too expensive.

2. In regards to server capacity, there are times when external hosting makes sense. In those cases I wouldn't have a big problem with external hosts. HOWEVER, the host should be just that... a host. A provider of machines and bandwidth. Add in some light security admin to help deal with hackers extra. But if you don't control the code then you are at the mercy of the provider. If they flake out of on you then your business dies right then and there. Over 70 percent of businesses that suffer a major harddrive failure that causes their core database to get wiped without backup do not survive. That is, if most companies lose their core data storage and computer organization they die.

3. As to data security, it isn't just data security. Its control over your software. If I build a business, I don't want another company to be able to fuck with my system without my permission. I want to buy something, control it, and any alterations to that system happen with my approval. You say what if you don't mind getting hacked? Okay... but do you mind the company disabling your whole software package and forcing you to upgrade for no reason? Or do you mind if they change your interface without your permission? Move buttons around, change the nature of the language, etc? Its not appreciated once you have a live project. These companies can make their upgrades and changes BEFORE the product goes into use. Once its live, I don't want them touching anything unless I approve it. End of story.

4. As to being a medium business... neither small nor large... even a mom and pop outlet can self host so I don't see why you can't self host at any level. The only issue with self hosting is the bandwidth. Hosts tend to locate themselves near some kind of ISP nexus and then buy enterprise quantities of bandwidth which they subdivide amongst their customers. The cost of the bandwidth for ONE medium sized company is often not that great especially if you arrange it through one of the subcontracting ISPs that tend to have more flexible packages for those market segments.

Point being... external cloud storage is mostly a product of laziness and ignorance. You can arrange internal cloud or at the very least a private external cloud without a lot of trouble.

The only cloud services I like these days are drop box and mozy. I like drop box because you're just using them as a file server. Nothing sophisticated. Nothing integral. Utterly replaceable. And then you have mozy which is a situation where offsite storage is quite nice and again you can replace them if their terms become unfavorable.

But anything more invasive then that? Never.

hugging? how quaint

[Connie_Lingus]

im flat out fucking my server.

take that, cloud geeks.

Re:hugging? how quaint

[sexconker]

im flat out fucking my server.

take that, cloud geeks.

I used to fuck my servers but they don't come with the necessary 8" external drive bays anymore.

Re:hugging? how quaint

[H0p313ss]

im flat out fucking my server.

take that, cloud geeks.

That brings new depth to the phrase: "The fucking server is down."

Re:hugging? how quaint

[Anonymous Coward]

im flat out fucking my server.

take that, cloud geeks.

That brings new depth to the phrase: "The fucking server is down."

I once had a coworker tell me he was going to bounce the fucking server.
I thought he meant he was going to reboot it.......

"Cloud computing" is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Cloud" is a fucking scam to start with and anyone relying on it for any business purpose or anything even important is an idiot and is not only throwing their money away, they're handing their data to some shit company that wants to data-mine it and/'or steal it.

Well played...

[argStyopa]

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

[raymorris]

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 with coworkers all day. Due to geography, we have a single-homed internet connection. If our email were out in the cloud, an internet outage (or slowness) might cost $20,000 per hour in lost productivity. We should definitely have our email and AD servers on site.

Of course, where on site servers make sense, you can still apply _some_ "cloud" concepts for high availability. Those should be targeted, though, a specific action for a specific need. It would be silly to just blindly "cloudify" an existing well-designed infrastructure which currently has a pair of high performance database machines using battery backed DDR for insanely fast storage, a pair of file servers with well designed tiered storage, etc.

Mod parent up!

[khasim]

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:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this parent up! (right above me)

This should be the textbook reasons to avoid the fucking cloud.

Clouds are fine for most end-users, but a potential disaster for businesses.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Plus, for many of us who have specific needs, going with cloud hosting would cost nearly 10x more than what we're paying right now.

He doesn't understand the needs admins have but he's more than happy to insult us all anyway. That dumbass can go fuck himself.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5: DDOS attack taking down my ISP's connection. (Yep, a company here was brought to a standstill for half a day for exactly this reason.)

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Server Hugger...Tree Hugger... ;-)

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed X 10!

What the fuck is this crap article doing on /.?

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. You have to worry about this no matter what hosting facility you use, whether cloud or co-lo.
2. Same as 1.
3. I'd much rather have an admin console capable of doing everything rather than having to physically go someplace when remote management fails. We do both cloud and co-lo currently and I've, thus far, found the AWS console to be mostly there and their support to be address problems faster than the travel time to our co-location facility.
4. Large providers like Amazon won't have their physical hardware seized. Governments will accept machine images instead. Hell, Amazon might even have a simple process for transitioning a running instance from the public cloud to their gov cloud for forensic work.
5. Encryption. The same way you'd do it at a co-lo.
6. Cloud hosting is a commodity and if you've noticed the trend, prices go down, not up. As long as there remains competition in cloud hosting, the kinds of players involved (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc) will ensure that it's always a race to the bottom when it comes to prices.

I agree with everything that people are saying about security when it comes to cloud hosting, but the point that's being missed is that cloud hosting isn't really all that different from co-located hosting. Unless you're buying servers that are hardened against attacks from an attacker with physical access to the machine (and almost no one does), hosting in the cloud basically has the same security profile as hosting at a co-location facility.

It's one thing if you're a company large enough to run your own hosting facility. But if you're not that big, I'm inclined to agree with him that people clinging to co-located setups are being irrationally afraid.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's still right about one thing though...we need a shift of mindset in the industry. Cloud isn't right for all situations, but the mindset shift should be from the current "why cloud?" to "why not cloud?" There will always be situations where there is a valid answer but many, if not most, situations won't have a reason why cloud hosting won't work. And absent that reason, you really should be choosing cloud at this point.

There's so many benefits of cloud hosting that are so hard to do with traditional hosting. Once you stop viewing your infrastructure as a collection of physical hardware and start thinking about it as recipes to create logical components, a lot of stuff gets easier...elastic scaling, DR site, 100% parallelized CI builds, multi-region load balancing/failover...this is all stuff that takes a ton of time, expertise and a lot of money to do with co-location facilities. But with cloud hosting, launching more instances in response to increased traffic is a simple matter. The DR site doesn't have to be completely hot...my whole infrastructure is recipes that I can spin up in a different datacenter in relatively short order...only the databases need to run and replicate during normal operations. And my builds just spin up a new machine, run and spin down...there could, literally, be a thousand other build running at the same time and my build will complete in the same amount of time. Ready to launch in Europe? Run the recipes in the European region and you're done.

The point is that most businesses aren't in the business of running data centers or maintaining servers. It's an activity that we've done because we had to in order to conduct our actual businesses. The cloud is about recognizing that fact and taking as much of that non-domain work that we've been doing off our plates. People who specialize in one narrow aspect of the operation should be responsible for worrying about keeping that aspect up and running...they'll almost always do a better job of it than someone who's worried about all aspects of the operation.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, who cares what "Curtis Peterson says"?

Person who works for company producing X says everyone needs X.

I sell left handed widgets. Everyone needs a left handed widget, even if you are right handed, and if you don't have a left handed widget then you are an idiot. Or, well, I can't justify my $10million salary if you don't. But don't think it's all about my own self-interest or anything - I'm purely saying this for your own good out of the goodwill in my heart. (/sarcasm)

Re:Mod parent up!

[Kinky_B]

10. No one has yet tested WHO exactly the data on those wonderful cloud servers belongs to. 11. What happens if without telling you the cloud provider is browsing your data and selling it off on the dark web

Re:Mod parent up!

[davidhoude]

I am very curious how they are running a public cloud if they themselves are not server huggers.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

10. No one has yet tested WHO exactly the data on those wonderful cloud servers belongs to.

11. What happens if without telling you the cloud provider is browsing your data and selling it off on the dark web

Encrypt the data on the cloud server and require applications and users to authentic before access to the data is granted. Given the prevalence of data breaches for in-house databases and systems the cloud seems no more or less risky.

Re:Mod parent up!

[rioki]

No no... You see their cloud service runs in the cloud. It is out there...

Re:Mod parent up!

[keneng]

I'm a server hugger because clouds are too unwieldy and fluffy to hug :) Cloud is not a threat to server huggers. It is a complementary technology.
If the server you're hugging is dead in the water for whatever reason like an ACT OF GOD, the cloud is great for remote backup of your data or failover to ensure some service is provided from elsewhere at a different location where the ACT OF GOD had no effect. Google, Amazon, Ubuntu all have the ability to specify "Geographically dispersed locations"/"bitbucket locations" for your cloud storage/cloud apps. GOOGLE, AMAZON, UBUNTU win for cloud because when your requirements include that kind of thing, you won't be able to implement the same thing in a manner that is as cost-effective as GOOGLE, AMAZON, UBUNTU. For big companies 4k$/month is a drop in a bucket.

If however you are a "TRUST NO ONE WITH MY DATA HUGGER", that's a different matter. You'll want to encrypt your data, You'll want to own the servers where the data resides no matter what the costs and not want to trust GOOGLE, AMAZON, UBUNTU with your data. That's where DIY IN-HOUSE SERVER and IN-HOUSE GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED BACKUP/FAILOVER SERVERS are interesting. You can call it IN-HOUSE CLOUD. As an example UBUNTU offers IN-HOUSE CLOUD solutions: Check out ORANGE BOX:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/20...

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not advocating for the cloud, but

1. Your connection going down.

Not your concern.

2. My connection going down.

Who cares!

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen and Amen.

Re:Mod parent up!

[X0563511]

#4 really needs to be addressed. They need to stop doing that. It made sense when the server room was a closet, or in someone's house... it doesn't make sense in hosting environments.

Own advice

[sunking2]

Maybe he should stop hugging the twinkies.

There's a Bell Curve to ROI

[Kagato]

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 host.

Other things that effect ROI are HIPPA and PCI. You may still be on the cloud, but you may have to go through a third party that is willing to bond and insurance the security of the setup, even if the end servers are still AWS, Rackspace, etc. That costs some serious money.

Re:There's a Bell Curve to ROI

[Anonymous Coward]

HIPAA.... PCI... YADDA YADDA

PSHAW!
Nobody ever gets sued out of business for privacy violations.
corporation:too big to fail::individual:to small to survive , because corporations are people, too, dontcha know...

Been there, done that.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud sucks. But yeah... don't be a server hugger. Keep selling your "obsolete" but still perfectly capable servers on eBay so I can snatch them up for a song and a dance.

So, the mainframers finally win

[Catbeller]

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!

[Y2K is bogus]

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

[sexconker]

Just say NO to the fucking cloud.

Give it Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you see the value in this marketing message. It doesn't matter where your data is stored or even if it's legally protected. What matters is whether you avoid being labled!

I was expecting more practical advice...

[pushing-robot]

* 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

[Charliemopps]

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... :-)

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know this?

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

God I feel really sorry for you, holy shit.

Re:How the cloud works

[Rakarra]

Oh my God. Oh my God.

And I thought I had bad stories to tell.

Re:How the cloud works

[Rakarra]

But in the end you got a +5 comment on Slashdot, so it was all worth it, right?

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know this???

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fear not! We've created our own API!

But you can only make n x as many user accounts you have in any 24 hour period. If you need more get in touch with Customer Service to buy access to more.

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask me how I know this

How did you know that?

Re:How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

lemme guess: you are the CEO of the said cloud service provider

Leasing is always more expensive than buying

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if the company doesn't have to pay for a sysadmin anymore...

I didn't watch the video

[Zeromous]

...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.

Re:I didn't watch the video

[IwantToKeepAnon]

...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.

That's not a "cloud", that's a virtual server farm. Doesn't have the same ring and the C?O hasn't heard the buzz on those. :-/

Re:I didn't watch the video

[Zeromous]

No the cloud is the automation/self-service that is the front end for the virtual server farm. Source: I run both types of environments.

Re:I didn't watch the video

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

"Cloud" is just a stupid name for a "Server". Now STFU and go back to working for Mr. Peterson.

Some people have clouded judgement.

[Obscene_CNN]

Why put critical and confidential information on a medium that you can't be sure is going to be accessible or secure? I have news for people with clouded judgement, The internet is not secure or reliable. Idiots with backhoes and gophers can strike any time crippling your business for days. Then there is the fact that ISPs screw up and I'm sure the could company isn't mistake free either. Then there is the risk of data security. The best way to keep data from being spread all of the net is not to spread it all over the net. Just because this clown can make money off your company doesn't mean its in your best interest.

i have a words for VOIP providers too

[Anonymous Coward]

middle men, parasites, leeches, opportunists

One thing they never mention...

[BobMcD]

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.

Dedicated servers are cheaper / faster.

[musixman]

If your company actually has a large amount of web traffic. Or a large backend software system that holds business critical information. The to the cloud chant!, is really stupid.

Its almost never cheaper in my experience to move into the "cloud". Sure, hosting your static files & images on a CDN (Eg cloud) service that makes sense.

Just buy a managed servers from a good hosting company, they will do all the "work" just like in the cloud & you will reduce you bill easily 50% then using cloud services.

Not just cost issues

[aaronb1138]

The uptime from various cloud vendors is pretty poor. Sure the server is up, but some networking or SAN component is sketchy a lot more than in-house managed servers. Cases in point:
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.

Re:Not just cost issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that "Tad" more storage has just increased costs to the supplier by a factor huge factor, you've reduced the density of the blades, you've now increased complexity, support and monitoring. I would certainly be charging you much more for that privilage - at which point you'll jump to a "cheaper" supplier to save money ...

Summary completely misses the point

[dskoll]

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).

I run my own cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a cluster of 2 nodes in my living room to provide all of my serve needs. I can easily add and remove applications through a mechanism known as: plug-and-play. where I physically connect new equipment to my cloud. The cloud is connected together through the ether using a networking fabric known as EtherNet.

(but seriously, I run web applications in a KVM instance on my server, not counting the old stuff I still run on linode and chunkhost. which I'll eventually move over to my "cloud")

Idiotic

[drolli]

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 which you would need to check if yout fulfilled all obligations for your purpose by making some contract.

THIS IS FUCKING STUPID

[Anonymous Coward]

and I hate people who act like they're "industry leaders" like this idiotic FUCKTARD!

Get over your goddamn technology, assholes, and go outside, read a BOOK, or meet a girl in real life!

So conflict of interests much?

[Fallen Kell]

Seriously a cloud service provider saying that people not using cloud service providers are holding onto old antique ideas and are not saavy enough to cut it in the existing world... Color me purple.

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 you are developing to see how it works across hundreds/thousands of systems and find what breaks and when. But to actually risk your company's data by handing it over to someone else no matter how good of a usage contract you have is outright idiotic. The mere loss of control over the data could mean that you are not compliant with laws that govern your actions (privacy laws for certain kinds of data, consumer protection laws for billing information, trade secrets and NDAs you have signed with other companies, etc).

Small vs Big

[The Raven]

Cloud hosting removes the need to hire employees to cover certain duties. Backups Virtualization Database Admin etc Cloud makes sense for small companies who cannot afford enough expertise to adequately handle these issues. A cloud service (in theory) will have more (and more competent) people handling these areas than a small business can muster. But large companies? If you have over 1000 employees, you probably should not be cloud hosting your trade secrets, customer data, and core business value.

Re:Small vs Big

[networkzombie]

You are oversimplifying it just a bit. It's not just small vs. big. I stopped hosting my personal web site years ago simply because it wasn't critical. That's why most companies have also done so. Providers are getting better as the market expands, but businesses will move to hosted services accordingly, not because some VP of cloud operations says so. Hell, the salesman at the BMW dealership thinks I should drive nothing else, and that I need a new one every six months! You have to consider ROI. Trading a capital expenditure for reoccurring costs can end up costing you more than you bargained for. You also have to consider that moving to the cloud while everyone else is doing it is mob mentality. If you put your ERP in the cloud and it goes down for one single day, how much do you have to pay in overtime for those employees to record everything in Excel only to have to enter it into the ERP system after hours? How does that affect moral? What if they have a VDI. Will they even have Excel? How much does the extra bandwidth cost? Did you go over the SLA with a lawyer? What if your payment is delivered 20 minutes late? Even the electric company doesn't shut you out right away. Will they raise prices? If you crunch the numbers and it works for you, great. I actually get work from companies moving from the cloud because they had no idea it would suck so bad, mostly due to bandwidth costs.

Okay.

[Anonymous Coward]

My company moved from TEH CLOWD!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111111111eleven to a system with more memory and CPU than we'll need for the forseeable future and SSD as the slowest form of storage. While completely gutting our hosting costs. Yes, I'm including hardware cost and depreciation, as well as power, bandwidth, rack space, routing/networking infrastructure, et cetera.

The ghost of Billy Mays would be required to properly elaborate how much money we're saving.

Meanwhile, our shit does not go down; we do not have angry developers railing about shit cloud performance, and more importantly, our data, and our clients' data, is secure and entirely in our hands.

I've got a message for Curtis Peterson: Admins who move to TEH KLAUHD!!!!!!!!!11111 without good reason are big, floppy, flaccid penises.

Adobe Creative Cloud Service offline... AGAIN

[Anonymous Coward]

Hug THIS: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/15/1429204/adobe-creative-cloud-services-offline-again

Re:Adobe Creative Cloud Service offline... AGAIN

[PPH]

They just switched to one of those mushroom-shaped clouds

Image related. It's the person who thought this would be a good idea.

I gotta say...

[Lab Rat Jason]

...that cloud services make a lot of sense when you want your product (website) closer to the consumer (other users distributed around the world). It makes no sense at all when you want to put your product (intranet site) closer to the consumer (users distributed around said office). As previously stated, in the former situation, you reduce your connectivity risk, assuming the cloud service has better connection redundancy than you can provide (probability of link failure * number of independent links) but in the latter situation it increases your risk because the connections are not independent, as a successful connection requires both the office connection and the cloud connection to be working (probability of link failure / number of dependent links).

It's kind of like "backwash" when you've got 500gb of log files to process, why would you move those files through the coffee straw that is your internet connection, so that an offsite system can process the files, then return the processed data back through said coffee straw... when the alternative is to just process it on site?

Bottom line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any IT manager of a large organisation that moves to the Cloud is just admitting they can't do their job so they need someone else to do it.

There is absolutely no agenda in his statement

[Anonymous Coward]

None at all!

While I don't mind cloud, no way am I outsourcing the IT systems of a billion-dollar company to some jackoff in lala land. It stays all in-house, along with all of the proprietary data.

Especially after I tracked back a hacking attempt to (chaching!) a cloud-based IT company in America who had managed to get a computer compromised.

How the cloud works

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the "Trusted Partners Network" employee?

Hype Hugger

[Rotten]

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.

Re:Hype Hugger

[Anonymous Coward]

He's either a NSA hugger or a short bus hugger...

The Cloud is Servers!

[Culture20]

It's servers. The Cloud is made out of servers. They're making our remote computing out of servers. Next thing, we'll be replacing our local servers for remote servers. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
You tell everybody. Listen to me. Hatcher. You've gotta tell 'em! THE CLOUD IS SERVERS! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me⦠PLEASE!!!

Re:The Cloud is Servers!

[gnupun]

t's servers. The Cloud is made out of servers. They're making our remote computing out of servers.

Yes, but the cloud servers are (supposedly) much cheaper. Say you have to pay $50K admin salary to maintain 5 servers in your office. That's over $10K per server per year cost (excluding cost of hardware/software). Since the cloud companies use one admin for say, a hundred servers, their admin cost per server per year is only $500 -- much cheaper. They are going to charge you between $2,000 and $5,000 per server and it will still be cheaper than employing your own admin and owning your servers. Of course, greater the number of servers you use, the less cost-effective the cloud becomes compared to self-owned servers.

Even with these advantages, the cloud still causes a terrible loss of control and privacy of your data.

Looks like it is working great for you Curtis.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, his service in the "cloud" is working so well for him. Lots of jitter in your video call there buddy. He's the typical clueless VP that thinks that everyone needs to put their data in the cloud just because it sounds cool to him. He's not even thinking about how many people absolutely cannot host their data at another facility because of security reasons or because of levels of availability that can NEVER be guaranteed by a provider. This short-sightedness from their VP of operations makes me realize I will never do any business with this company and will remember their name for this reason. Good job Curtis, you probably just alienated a large portion of your potential customer base. Fool.

Yet more cloud BS ..

[lippydude]

You move into the "cloud" and you end up paying a yearly rent for an IT infrastructure that you don't own or control and is virtually unstable. Virtual Operating Systems running on Virtual Machines running on top of Virtual Switches, what could possibly go wrong ..

its called the SledgeHammer Principle

[RobertLTux]

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...)

Re:its called the SledgeHammer Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were going to say

They all claim 'trust me, I know what I'm doing.'

I'll keep hugging my servers

[JohnFen]

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.

I know one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure as fuck not going to use his service. Anyone so stupid they don't know not to insult their potential customers is too stupid to do business with me.

No tough questions asked, just an ad

[Anonymous Coward]

In all honesty I would have thought Robin would have asked some pointed questions. The way this comes off it's nothing but an ad for clouds.
How do you handle HIPAA data, how much are your staff being paid, what's the average time staff are employed for before leaving/getting fired, tell me about your security staff their background and how you keep everything nice and secure...

Server Hugger

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what he thinks, opinions driven by blatant self interest really aren't that valuable.

So how'd ya like the Slashvertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that if all of you above who're tired of this kind of thing just send email to Mr. Peterson that his wonderful cloud service ad went up only a few stories after one about Adobe's Creative Cloud going down, he might rethink his relationship with Dice Holdings, Inc.

RingCentral Is Oversubscribed Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently we setup an office in Austin and used RingCentral.

Calls consistently sounded like you were calling from a cell phone in an elevator... in the basement... of a TEMPEST building....

Switched to a new provider, exact same cisco SIP phones, exact same internet.

Magic it works!

So the guy selling way overpriced VOIP

[silas_moeckel]

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.

What do you call a cloud hugger then?

[zeroryoko1974]

Cloud Hugger? Cloud Puffer? Head in the Clouds?

Born in the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey there Curtis...

Don't be an NSA hugger. That's like so last decade.

Only old people still host their apps in the US or in US-based cloud farms.

Don't trust the cloud

[Oryn]

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.

Re:Don't trust the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no cloud apologist, but certainly you know the cloud is not just other people's servers like any third party hosting in the past. It has more to do with virtualization of OS environments and all the amazing things you can do with virtualization ideas. Also, consolidating system administration expertise into big shops who really know or have the capacity to deal with and take advantage of a large server farm, as opposed to small shops with maybe no competent administrators.

One issue that might crop up...

[Richy_T]

I use AWS and I think it's a pretty good service overall. They seem keen to answer a lot of the security issues people have.

What I have been noticing though is more and more people saying they are blocking Amazon AWS IP addresses because of various attacks that are originating from the service. I am concerned that this may cause some serious issues down the line (not so much for me but for others).

Other than that, in the run up to Christmas, it was not unusual to attempt to launch instances to have the API inform that no more instances were available. Luckily, that application was not mission critical. Cause for concern though.

As long as I'm accountable

[epyT-R]

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".

Don't be a...

[wonkey_monkey]

Don't Be a Server Hugger!

Don't be a telling-me-what-to-do-with-my-server... er.

We went from cloud to server hugging

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud was costing us far more than simple server. Our whole firm migrated back from the cloud to servers. So yeah call me a server hugger. I am calling myself a right-tool-for-the-right-job hugger.

Neologisms

[Anonymous Coward]

Another new term is GOOC... Grand Olde Oil Cartel.

2cts

Move to "the cloud!"

[Chas]

Sure! Everything's great!

Except you're opening up pieces of your infrastructure to the public Internet.
At that point, you're opening up this MASSIVE surface area to attack. Sure you can go in and lock down each and every instance. One by one, or with a script or AD.

Sure.

With servers in-house, I can simply double-firewall them and the only point of attack becomes my update server, which I can lock down nicely.
Plus I don't have to worry about being nickeled and dimed to death for a bunch of glorified VMs.

Sure, MAYBE it's not as agile as putting up a machine on demand.
But if I do my job right, I can do that anyhow in my own VM environment. And save money in the long run.

get real

[slashmydots]

I have a snarky photo response proving the article wrong but it's in my Adobe cloud storage, which is offline at the moment....oh wait....

Confidentiality

[loufoque]

Is the thing that prevents from going to cloud

Just installed Office 365 in over a 300Mbit pipe

[Anonymous Coward]

It took 3 hours and I got a series of warning messages saying my internet connection was too slow. This rather large tech company has a 300 mbps down, 100 mbps up connection.

Putting everything into the cloud has drawbacks other than sysadmins letting go of their hardware. Take a look at the Google Apps deployment guides (the MS ones are all unicorn farts) and tell me how an IT department can put thousands of users into a hosted cloud app without hitting major network performance and security problems.

The clowd..

[Anonymous Coward]

MEH...

I've watched several businesses in my area move to the cloud and move right back.. Some of them still use the 'cloud' for offsite backup services but that's about all..

Additionally, most businesses are years behind on tech decisions, many are still deciding weather or not to virtualize.

"My! What big servers you have!" , "The better to spy on you with my dear..."

Mindless dribble.

[Anonymous Coward]

And this person is a 'penis hugger' then?

WTF is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "interviewer" sounds wasted. What an asshole this guy is. What the fuck does he think the cloud is hosted on?

Seriously Curtis. Get back to the used car lot.

Doesn't Link to an Article?

[__aablib8664]

Anybody notice this story doesn't link to a real article, nor is Curtis Peterson mentioned once on that Forbes page linked to? Its written by a guy named "Ben Kepes", and 'Server Hugger' is only mentioned in the title, thats it.....wtf?

Re:Doesn't Link to an Article?

[__aablib8664]

Anybody notice this story doesn't link to a real article, nor is Curtis Peterson mentioned once on that Forbes page linked to? Its written by a guy named "Ben Kepes", and 'Server Hugger' is only mentioned in the title, thats it.....wtf?

...and apparently no video was to be seen in my browser prior to bitching. Applying self-face-palm....

Don't be a Cloud Hugger

[Anonymous Coward]

If this whole "water gate" thing and the gas crisis has got you down, just remember this: some things really are getting better. Your department can afford a PDP-11 of its own! You don't have to stay tied to the old ways of depending on someone else's unresponsive bullshit, not getting things the way you want them, and for everything to be so damned expensive. All of that is gone, as gone as the Beatles. So boogie down, my disco ducks!

Some people are even saying that in just ten years, you'll be able to afford a computer for each employee, and that somehow the total bill will end up costing less than a single PDP-11. (I think that's crazy talk, but maybe they're talking about "micro vax" I've been hearing about.)

..

Heh, I'm all for updating but these "cloud people" are the ones who are asking you to trade your car for a horse. Their clocks are just plain running backwards.

Re:Don't be a Cloud Hugger

[fisted]

So much this.

legacy v4 website?

[Anonymous Coward]

% host www.ringcentral.com
www.ringcentral.com is an alias for wildcard.ringcentral.com.edgekey.net.
wildcard.ringcentral.com.edgekey.net is an alias for e3743.c.akamaiedge.net.
e3743.c.akamaiedge.net has address 2.19.143.61

Cloud hugger might benefit from a little AAAA action? I'll stick with my IPv6 servers until they get up to speed on that.

It's turtles all the way down...

[msauve]

"VP of Operations for RingCentral, a cloud-based VOIP company, so he's obviously made the jump to the cloud himself."

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?

Server hugger?

[Anonymous Coward]

No let's be an NSA hugger instead...

What a fuckwit

[Anonymous Coward]

Curtis Petersen is a knob-gobbler.

Remember ID4

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

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.

PCI compliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it be done?

Look! Touch! See!

[AndyCanfield]

A few days ago our backup server died. The hub server detected that no back up had been done for over an hour, and changed the server status web page background from green to red. I saw it and drove over to the office - it's about 4 kilomters from here - and had a look around. Computers were OK, but the router needs replacing.

If you have wings and long hair and a beard and a white robe and a belt made out of rope maybe you can fly into the cloud and do the same.

connections just aren't reliable enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most places i've worked go nuts if email is down for 5 minutes.
At least with an on prem server they can still get their email if the internet connection goes down, In the cloud, if the net goes down, everything stops.

Internet outages are still way too common here for me to consider moving to the cloud.

yawn

[ewieling]

"the next big thing" has been moving between putting the compute power centrally (mainframe, mini, terminal server, etc) and putting compute power on the desk (PCs in various incarnations) since the mid 1980s. What people don't realize is IT is difficult and expensive to do well. At least if you keep your servers inhouse you can fire the asshole who screws up too badly. With sourced IT that doesn't happen. If you piss off your cloud provider they have your data so you do what they say. In a few years I expect compute power to move back to the desk top and someone will come up with some cool buzzword to extract money from stupid people by convincing them this new thing is so much better than the old thing you'd be a fool not to make the switch. No product ever lives up the the fantasies sales people have about it. I dream of the day when sales people will be legally accountable for what they tell the customer, much like a lawyer or doctor is.

I stopped reading at

[fisted]

weâ(TM)ve gone cloud, weâ(TM)ve gone network, weâ(TM)ve gone application, quick integration.

Re:I stopped reading at

[fisted]

god dammit /.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

If you are doing it already, sure...

[ndykman]

I've seen two reactions to cloud-based systems with people I've worked with.

The first always is talking about all the negatives including downtime, how awful vendors are to work with and how much better they are and that nobody really understand the business like they do.

The second just notes that some of the stuff from the cloud helps them update existing infrastructure to be more useful and flexible and that they are happy to work to making the existing datacenters work better and use off-premise vendors when it makes sense. If you call that a private or hybrid cloud, that's fine by them.

Oddly, the first group also seems to be those that dismiss it outright are the ones that seem to think that it needs to take a month to get a new server. And insist they must have absolute control over every one of those servers and every service and that giving anybody the ability to do so (even for development or testing) is insanity.

The first group also seems to be taking down a server for maintenance every weekend or so for a few hours, can't seem to add an account in anything in less than four days, don't even know half the services they actually run with the other half being half-baked home-grown monsters. And mail and the network just go down and they are still running a six year web proxy and ban Pandora or Spotify because security.

The second group I don't notice because stuff just works, and when I talk about self-service VMs, they point me to the project they are testing right now, but are waiting on management to approve. And they are okay with me streaming some tunes, because they've got that traffic prioritized correctly and they are okay with me installing stuff because they are proactive in detecting threats and don't blindly trust a machine just because it is in the building.

TL; DR. I agree. The sysadmins that don't care about where the machines are (only about what they do) don't need to worry. Those that do, do need to worry.

Servers and the Data on them are like Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

Servers and the Data on them are like Gold, if you can't pick it up and hold it then you don't own it!

Poltergeist: The Cloud

[Crypto Cavedweller]

That guy talks and I hear a creepy little woman saying "All are welcome, all are welcome ... come into the light!"

Well lets check with the lawyers...

[technopoptart]

Well, some server huggers may be more worried about compliance laws, liability lawsuits. When you host you own data its under your physical control and you can take measures to safeguard it more proactively because you are at the server, router,switch. You can look at the traffic and packets going in and out, you can monitor the file i/o on the drives. with the cloud you let your data(about other people) out of your direct control.

Re:Cloud-based services company exec shills for cl

[Anonymous Coward]

...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?

Yep and it appears to have worked, err, backfired?

The cloud is still servers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I hear something like this. Is this fact that "the cloud" is simply a set of servers running specialized software completely lost on these people??? It's hardly equivalent to switching from horses to cars. More like switching from cars to slightly different cars. The claim can't even be made that the cloud somehow makes managing the servers that much easier because they can be swapped out more easily. Redundancy services like that have existed for quite a few years already. This "cloud" stuff drives me nuts!

regardless of service levels...

[roc97007]

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.

Re:Wrong solution

[Neuroelectronic]

>you can always encrypt stuff

and put the keys in the cloud too. It's not like they can easily reverse engineer your foss-based stack, or simply intercept the data in transit. Because they can't because because.

ringcentral is ass

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former customer of Ringcentral, I believe that they shouldn't be giving any sort of tech advice to anyone.

No place to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading the above book by Glenn Greenwald, I think I'll hold on to my own servers a while longer, just to distribute the data and make it a tad less simple for NSA to collect it all.

The world needs more datacenters, not less.

Horse hugging?

[Anonymous Coward]

We went on a horseback vacation in the rockies. Some of these paths were hard to maneuver by foot, impossible by car or motorbike. Horses are STILL a clearly superior mode of transport in the majority of areas on the planet (that are not roads). A person is NOT a "hugger" because they have brains enough to figure out the correct tool for a job.

Re:Yeah... Alchoholic Marketers

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off.

These guys are the personification of evil, pure and simple.

this is different

[Anonymous Coward]

no no no... this is different... were going to put *everyone's* eggs in this basket...

                                                                                                                                        -cloud basket

The Cloud is the future!

[Stimpak_Addict]

This guy sounds like he doesn't realize that The Cloud is just another phrase for "third party server farm with limited control and no maintenance options". I don't personally run or set up any servers, but if I were to do so, I'd apply the first rule of business: don't trust someone else to do their job.

Not Consistent.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company that is a major customer to a particular data center. I was assigned to figure out how to:
1. Boot up 'n' server instances on their cloud.
2. Register all instances in our "Farm".
3. Begin sending commands to the Farm, to do work.

Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately not.

They provide a web portal interface to boot up servers. However, filling out the form to get the server you want, only launches one instance, and I am NOT going to fill out this stupid form 40 times. I need to spin these up on a daily basis, and then shut them down roughly once a day.

Ok, they have some magic "API's" that I can leverage for an automation script. Awesome! Oh wait.... Turns out that for some reason, their hypervisor isn't able to transfer the image I created fast enough to deploy. An instance could take over 1 hour to boot up. At least their base images are cached and fast right? Too bad their base images don't serve my business needs until we get the stuff we need installed. A 30% success rate on booting an image within the hour is not acceptable. I'll have to wait until they re-architect the thing, because it's been confirmed that the problem I encountered is an issue with their architecture, and is not trivial to fix.

Try to connect to the IP Address of the cloud instance? Nope. The network layer is some obfusticated thing, so if your software needs to find the IP address that leads into the cloud instance, to receive instructions. You have 5 NIC's to choose from. All 5 are NOT the IP addresses that let you access them from an external source. It's a magic 6th one that the running OS doesn't know about, because it's handled by the hypervisor or something.

Configuration Management. You have a distributed cluster of various applications. Try monitoring 200+ servers, without knowing their IP addresses until run-time, categorizing them across their application type, while maintaining the assumption that any server you know exists, could have been shut down, and a brand new one with a brand new IP pops up. Oh, and all existing application servers that belong in the same category needs to also know about the existence of this new one that just popped up.

I am gradually getting closer and closer to getting this damn thing working. However, until I can hit one button, and result in dozens of servers to boot up and listen for instructions with greater than 95% reliability, I'd rather deal with rainclouds.

Excuse me while I go hug my server.

The cloud is slow and expensive

[sfcat]

I work for a startup that makes high-throughput SQL systems which handles millions of events/tuples per second. We tell our clients that they can run our software in the cloud but it only runs about 1/4 as efficiently as hosting your own servers. We are able to pipeline buffers effectively on local hardware, but the virtual abstraction layer destroys our performance. I doubt we are alone in this. So when you pay for a "server" in the cloud, you are really only getting 1/4 the I/O capacity as a local server and since we are talking about servers, their I/O capacity is really what you are buying. In my experience, virtualization is really about lazy sys admins who don't know/want to learn things like PXE and it does mean less time in loud and cold server rooms.

You know every time someone pushes something as hard as the cloud gets pushed, there is something worth knowing that they aren't telling you. In this case, its that the cloud will probably cost you more as you need 4x the number of "cloud servers" to handle the I/O load of your production servers. But hey, at least 'the cloud' sounds really cool.

We don't all live in California

[dbIII]

Electricity supply is reliable enough in many places to make it difficult to justify a generator for anything that is not utterly critical (which is a lot less than most people think).

Other larger companies had jet turbines on standbye.

That's bullshit hype unless they are a huge data centre and selling that as a MAJOR feature - tiny little jet engines from the 1950s can pump out 20MW which is the sort of thing used to cold start a power station - coal conveyers, crushers and all.

Tag censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

This was tagged with "fuckrightoff" which i think is more appropriate than the current tags. Why were the tags changed?

Public Cloud Services == Outsourcing

[phlawed]

In my opinion, employing public cloud services equates to outsourcing.
And outsourcing is great. For those who make a living by selling outsourcing services.

For others, it very much depends. Depending on external companies for something your company absolutely, unconditionally must have, every minute of the day? Managed by someone whose priorities are not necessarily 100% aligned with your company's priorities all the time? I'd limit that dependence...

Knowingly getting rid of knowledge and competence which possibly makes up a substantial piece of the company assets, is not great management. And if knowledge/competence/people is not considered a company asset, you're doing it wrong...

For a small shop, maybe

[weave]

For a small shop that it's not feasible to hire their own IT shop, I think it's viable. Other than that, no.

I was a very early advocate of moving stuff into the cloud and a very early victim of getting screwed by it. Before the cloud I could spend countless sleepless hours pacing around dealing with things like praying that a SAN spins back up after an extended site power failure with a backup generator fault failure or dealing with irate users on a Christmas morning wondering why I scheduled an email migration to happen that required email to be down for 24 hours. But at least it was my fault and I was in control.

After moving to the cloud I had things like extended service outages where I had irate users and I could do nothing but sit around and look stupid and helpless saying "the vendor is working on it" and not know even if anyone was actually doing anything besides refreshing the ticket system and occasionally posting a ticket update begging for a status update.

Curtis Peterson is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

I build cloud services and private clouds for a living. Don't put your data in someone elses cloud, buy/build your own..... And there is still a lot of sysadmin work to be done when you have one, it's not magic you know

"Cloud" storage a quickly dying trend

[Anonymous Coward]

I deal mostly with small businesses who either run their own servers or have them placed in a co-location facility.
With Comcast announcing they intend on forcing data transfer caps on all of their customers, and many other ISPs chomping at the bit to follow (including the one I work for), these "cloud" services this asshat speaks of are on the Endangered Services List.
Companies who aren't an ISP will no longer be able to afford storing their information off-site, or could risk severe monetary penalties or an inability to access their data until the next cycle of the data cap comes along.

Reliability

[Floyd-ATC]

Working for the local government means we can't rely on internet services or utility power to stay operational. Even if a major disaster hits, we need to be able to keep services running. That's why we have fault tolerant systems set up in multiple server rooms that we control. Our servers, our storage, our backup.

Fark the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Cloud"

= someone else fecking about with your data.

= someone else losing your data then saying "oh dear".

= someone else holding you hostage by deciding to raise prices by 100 fold then demanding huge fees to release your data.

Only a complete retard would trust "the cloud" for anything other than backing up totally innocuous data. It's such a brain dead idea I can't believe any one has been enough of a sucker to even think about using it.

That's a joke, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be.. it can only be a joke.... :

ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, here is another 'expert' talking about the cloud. In short terms he says, add another layer of insecure software underneath your own and be ok with that, be hardware agnostic, or be agnostic at all. Well fuck the cloud and to hell with him... I guess he never heard of words such us security as he may never implemented high performance sites or applications without adding new servers every time he couldn't tune things up...

Too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked into various "cloud hosting" services (Google Cloud Platform, Amazon EC2, Heroku, etc) for a project of mine, and it would cost about 5 times as much for the same resources as just renting a dedicated server somewhere.

There is a huge benefit to being able to not have to worry about the server itself, but not THAT much benefit, at least in my case.

Being able to "scaling up at the click of a button" is great, but if you're set up right then you can make use of that as an addition to your dedicated hosting during periods of heavy traffic. I can't imagine paying the expense 24/7 though.

Missing the point

[fa2k]

Kind of ironic how the IP video connection sucks so bad, for someone advocating full reliance on the network.

Peterson has a point, some admins refuse to even look at the cloud as an option. The "cloud hugger" metaphor is wrong though, the cloud is not a new version of the local server which is more efficient, performant and clean (sure, there were advantages to having horses too (vs. cars), but no notable advantages related to the main purpose, transportation). The cloud is just a different thing altogether, like an airplane vs. a car. A good admin needs to decide if outsourcing the operations makes sense for each case, also factoring in the costs (and hope the management trusts that decision). It's easy to take too much pride in one's craft, and insist on perfect solutions, when the business maybe only needs a fairly good solution.

At an infrastructure level, using "cloud" tools (i.e. virtualisation, management), is reasonably safe. These are reasonably portable across the remote / on premises boundary, though porting requires some effort.

At the application level, if the plan is to use cloud tools exclusively, it's easy to end up with inconvenient workflows or being stuck with some provider. Inter-operation between applications is sparse. Many cloud applications provide APIs, sure, but if you need a server to call APIs and synchronise data across providers, and the business becomes reliant on those scripts, have you really gained anything..?

Thanks for the tip, but.....

[NetNed]

What exactly do I do "Chris" when I have 5 or 6 people pulling 2 and 3GB cad files down from the cloud and it cripples every person on the network? Had a company we do work for tell us that all work would have to be done through a cloud feature in the software we use, with all it being saved back to their servers. When we starting asking questions on bandwidth and testing, it broke down quickly to it being a bad idea from a "cad administrator" in the company.

I'm hugging a new server to get 10Gb/s

[dbIII]

I'm hugging a new server to get 10Gb/s. That cloud salesman can think up any insults he likes but he's not selling anything remotely like what I want to buy.

I think the cloud is missing the point

[dbIII]

Personally I think the cloud is missing the point in general and is an artifact of limits to computer networks. Bandwidth bottlenecks and NAT make point to point access difficult and encourage storage on other people's servers with better connectivity. More fibre and IPv6 should blow the cloud away. If you have good connectivity you do not need any of these middlemen taking a cut.
So I think the cloud is missing the point of a well connected internet but it's what we have to put up with in a lot of cases until we can improve things enough to not need "cloud services".

Fuck the cloud

[setrops]

I can use all my memory all my cpu's, I don't want latency while v-cpu's are switching over and memory gets allocated.

His Head Is NOT In the Cloud

[LifesABeach]

If you have a Trade Secret, then do you mind anyone knowing it?

Horse to car a bad analogy

[Junta]

A better analogy would be a 'car hugger' who insists on owning a car when he can just rent one when needed. That pretty much is the 'cloud' model in a nutshell.

Car renting makes a lot of sense in some cases. If I drove once in a long while, it's better to rent than to own. If I'm a business that occasionally needs to move a large chunk of stuff, then I hire a moving company or rent a truck.

On the flipside, owning such vehicles makes sense for some people. If you need to drive 10 to 20 miles a day, you'd be crazy to just rent. If you are a moving company, you'd want to own your vehicles. Renting only works when your needs are so low as to be better to suffer the overhead of the vendor.

So yes, the cloud model has relevance for certain scenarios where the costs and risks go a certain way. It also doesn't make sense for a whole ton of scenarios. Cloud solutions can help those with usually light needs with occasional large needs and for cases where you can't secure the necessary skill or resources to mitigate your own risk effectively. Cloud solutions can also be expensive for clients with consistently high load and can subject the client to higher risks if the in-house skills and resources are available to do it better.

The Cloud is made up of servers

[pebear]

The definition of the Cloud is that I can get to my application and data from anywhere in the world on any device. The cloud itself is made up of servers and plenty of bandwidth. Most corporate applications do not need to be in the "Cloud". And applications and data as a service is just marketing. If you purchase the servers yourself or you purchase the service you are still gong to pay. If I'm offering services I have to divide up my costs and add in my take and that will be the price I charge you. If that is cheaper than what you can do it for yourself then you are happy and I"m happy. I try to keep my costs down by leveraging my huge numbers of servers and bandwidth and huge customer base so that the more the better because each individual customer will end up with lower costs due to shared resources. In the end the severs need to be somewhere they will not disappear. Even if you deal with Google for all your data needs the servers still exist, they exist in a Google data center and not in your data center.

The Cloud Is Good

[jtalle]

Adobe Creative Cloud

Sounds Like Cloud Services are Losing Their Luster

[konohitowa]

When someone that makes their living selling a product reverts to an appeal to emotion to get business, I figure they're unable to articulate a rational use-case for their product.

Coming Up Next: Cloud Deniers! Why Server Huggers Are Infringing On Your Computing Rights.

Big difference between clouds and cars

[sir-gold]

When cabbies switched from horses to cars, it didn't put the driver out of a job (made his job harder, if anything)

When you switch all you operations to the cloud, the first thing your manager is going to ask is "if everything is on the cloud, what exactly is our admin administrating now?".

We all know that the hard work doesn't go away when the servers do, but does he know this?

Another advertisement posing as an article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap like this insults the intelligence of the reader.

If this is the best you "editors" can do, you need to consider suicide
as your best possible contribution to the world.

Does he not realize

[Anonymous Coward]

that "The Cloud" is nothing more than servers simply located somewhere else?
So what about the companies that run those servers (that operate The Cloud)??

Mod OP down

[marxmarv]

Wow, I didn't know /. had gotten on the native advertising bandwagon.