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

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.