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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?
You mean this: Adobe Creative Cloud suffering extended outage
And here it is: https://github.com/panicsteve/...
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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.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
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.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.