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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?
Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
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.
davecb@spamcop.net
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?
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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!
-Styopa
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.)
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
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.
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) .
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
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?
Learn to love Alaska
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