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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?
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.
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?
Breaking News! Someone selling cloud services says anyone not using his type of product is backwards. Details at 11.
The NSA killed cloud computing.
Fuck off.
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.
Oh look a condescending dickbag who labels people who don't buy into his business model.
Fuck you Dice, fuck you and your sponsors.
Ad disguised as a troll. These are getting more common here.
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.
And no matter how much marketing jargon you spew at people, "the cloud" is still just a bunch of servers. Stop lying.
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.
...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?
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
"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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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... :-)
...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.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
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.
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...
What is "The Cloud"?
A symbol on a network diagram? - I'm sure that's how it started.
The way I see it "The Cloud" is just a name massively over-hyped by marketing folk for a hosted server that you have no clue about where it is.
I totally get the concept of being able to access your data everywhere and it's a great concept. It doesn't always work. Usually failing when needed the most.
There is a Cloud Computing Concept that I do trust It's called Private Cloud Computing. There is really nothing new about it. We have all been doing it for ages.
Its just simply running your own server. Most business do this and you can do this your self with your own server plus the aid of today's modern high speed internet connections.
If your internet fails you still have access to your data.
I personally don't trust "The Cloud". Think about it for a moment. You are putting your data on a server and you have no clue as to where it is. You have no clue about who else is able to see that data and you have no clue about who is watching as you access your data and probably no clue if that server is up to date on security patches.
Yes its cool that you can access it everywhere accept oh.. There's no cell coverage here and oh the free wifi might not be secure and oh I've been hacked.
Cloud backups? yeah right. I wonder how long it will take to backup my 3TB of videos to the cloud? I wonder how long it will take to restore them if a HDD should fail. I wonder if cloud backups count towards my broadband data cap? Large numbers of ISP's operate data capping the average is 100Gig per month. At that rate it would take 30 months to backup your data and 30 months to get it back.
What if the cloud backup gets hacked, how do I know my data is safe?
The short answer is you don't know if your data is safe. If you have sensitive data, its best not to put it on a server connected to the internet.
So Yes I may be a server hugger, but I know where my data is. I know where the backups are and I know my secure data is and its not stored in a place directly accessible to the internet.
As long as I'm accountable, 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".