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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.
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...
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.
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.
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
And no matter how much marketing jargon you spew at people, "the cloud" is still just a bunch of servers. Stop lying.
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...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
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?
If you don't own your server, you don't own your data.
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.
im flat out fucking my server.
take that, cloud geeks.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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
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.
Just say NO to the fucking cloud.
* 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 can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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... :-)
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.
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.
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.
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 ..
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...)
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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.
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...
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.
No sir I dont like it.
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".
"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?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.