How the Cloud Has Changed (Since Last You Looked)

snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at the new services and pricing models that are making cloud computing more powerful, complex, and cheaper than it was a few short years ago. 'We get more, but using it isn't always as simple as it could be. Sure, you still end up on root on some box that's probably running Linux, but getting the right performance out of that machine is more complex,' Wayner writes. "But the real fun comes when you try to figure out how to pay for your planned cloud deployment because there are more options than ever. ... In some cases, the cost engineering can be more complex than the software engineering."

Comments

The EC2 price list is pages long!

[Anonymous Coward]

And loads via AJAX, and fails to load more often than not! It's too damn complicated.

Re:The EC2 price list is pages long!

[sexconker]

Segmented content dynamically loaded via AJAX or similar is the devil.
It's the modern "article split across 10 pages for no reason". Give me a view-all link, and I'll wait for it to load.

For SOME content it's understandable (Twitter's result set for a hash tag, for example, but NOT the result of a user's entire tweet history), but the AJAX loading is still the devil. Give me traditional paginated loading as an option as well as a way to reliably trigger more content to load without making me hold the end key.

Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem I've countered is all of the goddamn awful hipster-created software that's out there these days.

We have to wade through mountains of Ruby on Rails and Node.js bullshit. Both of those ecosystems are fucking awful. Even small web apps need tens or hundreds of small, poorly-maintained libraries or modules that some schmuck threw together one weekend, put on GitHub, and then promptly forgot about. But a bunch of other schmucks then chose to build upon this shitty library, so now it's a dependency of all of them. So instead of getting real work done, you'll sit there waiting for rubygems or npm to install all of these fucking awful libraries.

Then there's the NoSQL bullshit. And the Docker bullshit. And the git bullshit. It all piles up!

Dealing with the cloud is the easy part. Dealing with the hipster bullshit is what's hard!

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[LordLucless]

> And the git bullshit.

Yeah, we never needed this new-fangled version control bullshit in my day. We just email our code changes around the office. Like men.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[tepples]

In what direction would you prefer that the ecosystem move? Incorporate local copies of said plug-ins into each application's repository?

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

> And the git bullshit

Yep, that git bullshit...created by the biggest hipster of them all, right?

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me what the hell GP is complaining about? Is he really complaining about using someone's software, in which they were "lazy" and relied on someone else's code?

I'm suffocating here on the irony. Save me.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[geekpowa]

At least the hipsters successfully buried all the needlessly complex crap the prior (my) generation of engineers inflicted upon the world, the whole horrible XML ediface for one: XML, SOAP, XSLT etc. My hats off to them. Fuck I hated XML, and I dance on it's grave. Good also to see insanely heavy weight app frameworks like J2EE slowly slide away too, great stuff hipsters: it's a terrible legacy you are painstakingly superceding, my apologies for my part in creating it.

Maybe it is in our blood, to channel our energies into at least one needlessly complex endeavour. Their baby is HTML apps (which we foisted upon them BTW so not entirely their fault), and the 'web-scale' cloud.

YMMV but I've found unless you are processing volumes that require rows upon rows of servers, not a couple of slots in a rack, bare metal dedicated gear from a decent 'cloud' provider works just fine. Still simple, and from my personal experience performance and reliability smashes my competitors who use shared cloud based gear. Tried Amazon a while back for a non-profit high volume site I helped migrate. Pricing and complexity of amazon did my head in, nice to hear it has only gotten worse since then. Finally got it running and the thing just crashed into the mountain no matter how many resources and elastic ips and other inscrutable voodoo we threw it at, did some benchmarks and figured DB IO was absolutely abyssmal. Switched to a simpler visualized single host (volumes high enough to justify bare metal but incredibly cost conscious so needed to make virtual work), running years without a hitch.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm suffocating here on the irony. Save me.

I would, but you don't seem to understand what irony is.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[sexconker]

I believe the AC is complaining about the general lack of quality, substance, documentation, reliability, and function of many of the new and popular "languages" (which are really frameworks). The examples of Ruby on Rails and Node.js are indeed "fucking awful" from the standpoint of getting worthwhile shit done, especially considering the amount of things you have to seek out and bolt on in order to get them to function as you would expect any other framework to (see the references to gems and npm). The "hipster" label seems to fit. These things are popular not because of their quality or utility, but because of their lack of quality and utility. And despite being popular, the people using them think they're unique for doing so. As soon as the users and developers see that they are no longer unique, they abandon ship and look for the next niche thing to claim as their own.

NoSQL is trash through and through. I have yet to meet a dataset worth looking through, ever, that didn't fit into a relational model of some sort. The anti relational model for data is a joke. If there is any information in data it can be modeled, and if any dataset contains more than one piece of the same type of data then you can develop useful relationships. NoSQL literally throws completeness, correctness, and consistency out the window. "Big data" people love NoSQL and the crazy variants used by Google, Amazon, etc. because they just want to dump data in and sell access to it. They don't care if it's correct, complete, or meaningful. Of course, even Google realizes they need ACID for data that matters, and have basically thrown the non-relational model out the window for their own purposes.

I sure as shit am glad I don't know what Docker is. I've heard references to it before (and I think there was a story on Slashdot about "one weird trick to make Docker take 99% less storage space!!1"), but I simply don't care. As for Git, I fail to see why it's needed when other version control systems already exist and work. My guess is that it gained popularity because of how brain dead simple it is to throw something up on github (which has its own problems, as was discussed on Slashdot recently).

Hipster software IS a fucking problem. Shit like RoR and Node.js fucking suck for most things, but idiots try to shoehorn it and adapt it to do what they need instead of using something better-suited to the task. Ruby (and RoR) is good for certain things, and I presume Node.js may have some sort of valid use case, but certainly not what people usually end up using them for. NoSQL is shit, and Git may be useful but the things people use it for rarely are. The bottom line is that there are people who will scream from the top of the mountain about their new project using Node.js and a non-relational database model that's hosted on github by developers using agile and trending on Twitter, but they won't be able to tell you what their project is or does, or why it's better than the existing solutions.

When the process becomes the project, the project becomes pointless.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Dunbal]

E-mail. Hah. We used to send over the boxes of punch cards on a trolley. Like men.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get is why so many devs chose a decentralized VCS like git, but then centralized on GitHub. Then they cry and moan when GitHub is down! Git isn't even a good DVCS. Mercurial is much better.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[LordLucless]

Even if GitHub goes down, you can point your repos to a different origin, and continue on as normal, so it still has value. But yeah, I just run my own repos for personal projects. Businesses seem to love paying people for stuff though.

I've used git and hg. I honestly can't see much difference between the two, but I've probably not dipped too deeply into their featuresets.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

NoSQL is shit

Hardly. NoSQL is glorious at what it does. What it does has nothing to do with replacing SQL, however, and if you pull that shit, it will fall flat on its face, because that's not what it's fucking for.

Git may be useful but the things people use it for rarely are

Git is far more pleasant even while being misused for simple CVS/SVN-style source control. But yes - look at the many GitHub is down stories with tons of comments from dumbfucks who don't comprehend that GitHub being down has fuck all to do with ability to write and commit code.

The bottom line is that there are people who will scream from the top of the mountain about their new project using Node.js and a non-relational database model that's hosted on github by developers using agile and trending on Twitter, but they won't be able to tell you what their project is or does, or why it's better than the existing solutions.

Jesus H. CowboyNeal, this, though. Entirely this.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

And get off my lawn!!!

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[FooAtWFU]

Eh. You're right about things being overhyped but you go too far in the opposite direction. Ruby/Rails is an effective combination for low-volume elevated-complexity latency-insensitive web-based software, the kind you might use internally to your business. Node is a useful tool for quickly writing nonblocking servers (much more useful when they use more than simply HTTP). NoSQL is effective when actually have a ton of data and with the right software (i.e. not Mongo) it can provide guarantees to do everything you want that's also mathematically possible on a data set that large.

But yes, while I like Node in theory, I just wish it wasn't in a freaky language like JavaScript. As for NoSQL... once your problem size is actually legitimately huge then you need to do obnoxious things to make everything work, one way or another, no matter what you do... so it really does pay to avoid it if at all possible (e.g. through clever sharding or the like).

And you're really right about how simple Github is - it almost makes up for the complexity of git itself. Git is a useful and powerful tool that is much nicer than the svn and cvs tools it replaced, and having distributed development available like that is quite effective, but you've actually got to bother to try and learn something about it (otherwise please stick with svn or whatever instead of whining about how a few modestly-cryptic commands and the implications of representing commit history as an immutable DAG are so hard to wrap your head around - this should be undergrad stuff and you've no business passing judgement on entire stacks if you can't grok it).

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

XSLT is the best. I have yet to see a website in XSLT I didn't love.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Zontar The Mindless]

In my way, we sent over the clay tablets bearing our changes on the backs of oxen. Noob.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be +5 insightful.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Zontar The Mindless]

XSLT kicks ass, and it makes my life easier in more ways than I can count. Don't blame the morons using it for stupid pet tricks for which it was never intended.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly child. In the good old days we just shouted. Loudly, like men.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Ace17]

A lot of people seem to equate "distributed version control" to "git". This is incredibly short-sighted (See mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper, darcs. Raise your hand if you're fluent in any other dvcs than git).

Git is the C++ of version control: it's incredibly powerfull, but needlessly complicated. It's the result of piling unrelated features while trying not to break the workflow of existing users.
The issue is, that after monthes of learning to master this complexity, you become convinced that it's necessary. It's not.

And yes, git can also be seen as version control for hipsters. After all, it's designed around letting people diverge from the accepted path :-)

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see a website in XSLT.

There, fixed that for ya.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

In my day we didn't have language so we all just roared noises into the wind. We felt manly like we'd said something meaningful, ask the while communicating and contributing nothing.

That's why I feel at home with slash dot comments.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[thegarbz]

I sure as shit am glad I don't know what Docker is.

Why would you write something like that based on one person's comment that it's "hipster"?

Docker is an open source project that solves a very real problem that linux libraries can often be a disaster to management outside of a package manager by providing a small contained environment in which all dependent libraries can sit.

I've seen someone hose an entire system trying to meet dependencies to compile a single program. Broke apt to the point where nothing would install or uninstall anymore. I myself have bashed my head against the wall trying to get a more current version of software working on an outdated system and eventually gave up because getting the right libraries in place would probably have broken more than it fixed. I eventually installed the program in it's own version of Linux inside a VM on the machine. Just like docker, only 300MB larger still.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use mercurial which is as easy to use as svn but with the power of git.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reggie Watts, is that you?

https://vimeo.com/13897452

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. Web apps just suck, and unless someone comes up with an API that allows you to say "Open window, put button on it, ..." and works realiably, this is not going to change. The idea of using browsers as a front end is ridiculous.

But the "cloud" just as stupid - it's called client/server architecture, for a start, and it only makes sense for certain applications. Also, unlike the submitter of the story seems to presume, "complex" is not a positive and desirable property.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. Now, how many times have you seen people use Docker for things that are not the situation you described? More importantly, how many use it and have no idea why? That's the hipster problem. It's people who use certain tech because it's cool and has name recognition, and not because they know anything about it.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, Sir!

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

> And the git bullshit.

Yeah, we never needed this new-fangled version control bullshit in my day. We just email our code changes around the office. Like men.

And we LIKED it, DAMMIT!

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

E-mail. Hah. We used to send over the boxes of punch cards on a trolley. Like men.

Ah, those were the days. When reading the punch cards through the reader, an error is almost guaranteed to occur in the middle of the deck. In that case one would simply turn that card up on the deck and continue processing the rest.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Dunbal]

We felt manly like we'd said something meaningful, ask the while communicating and contributing nothing.

So politics, then?

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[fredrated]

As a side note, I have about 7 ruby on rails books if anyone reading this is near Oakland CA I will give them away.

Re: Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

because DVCS is a superset of Centralized VCS? Because there are still unthibkable advanages of using a centralized model? Because even when used as a centralized VCS it is still nicer than SVN?

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[xTantrum]

A lot of people seem to equate "distributed version control" to "git". This is incredibly short-sighted (See mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper, darcs. Raise your hand if you're fluent in any other dvcs than git). Git is the C++ of version control: it's incredibly powerfull, but needlessly complicated. It's the result of piling unrelated features while trying not to break the workflow of existing users. The issue is, that after monthes of learning to master this complexity, you become convinced that it's necessary. It's not. And yes, git can also be seen as version control for hipsters. After all, it's designed around letting people diverge from the accepted path :-)

+2 for Insightful. I've said this time and time again. Down with RoR, Node, Git...just...down with it all, please. #hipsterSoftware #hipsterCoder

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[blue9steel]

> And the git bullshit.

Yeah, we never needed this new-fangled version control bullshit in my day. We just email our code changes around the office. Like men.

Real men print them out and send them via inter-office mail. That way they can be read while leaning back in your leather chair, drinking scotch and smoking a pipe.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[TemporalBeing]

NoSQL is shit

Hardly. NoSQL is glorious at what it does. What it does has nothing to do with replacing SQL, however, and if you pull that shit, it will fall flat on its face, because that's not what it's fucking for.

If your dataset is truly unstructured, then yes NoSQL databases work great. But odds are your data is actually structured and should be in an RDBMS. I worked on one project that insisted on using Cassandra despite the fact that the data was highly structured and fit far better, far easier into an RDBMS. The cost of Cassandra was one of the reasons (though not the only reason) the project got scrapped. Why did it cost so much? because some of the queries we had to do were extremely costly so we had to have a massive cluster to make up for the performance in order to hit the numbered needed for peak usage.Why Cassandra? For the ease of replication.

So yes, it works great for what it works for, but that stuff is typically niche stuff and abnormal. That said, most RDBMS's have incorporated similar functionality so you can continue using the RDBMS and still get the NoSQL-like functionality. PostegresSQL now has the ability to replicate nicely across the Cloud.

Re:Hipster software is the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

We used one of the several DVCS systems that existed before git. Alas, git and its awful UI got adopted by the hipster masses who think they need a system optimized for Linus' outlier needs rather than one built for normal software development. And we suffer, because wanting to collaborate, we prefer a shit standard than no standard.

Re:/. dead

[Anonymous Coward]

seems its not dead and you are not first. idiot.

AWS Sticker Shock: The Dark Side of the Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the cloud is fun tech, but remember the good old days when you would rent a non-scalable server, stick it in a server room and hope you did and didn't get slashdotted?

Problem with the cloud is you never know what your monthly bill is going to be. You can get a real shock and it is hard to budget because of that. Understanding those bills is itself a major drama and you forever have to keep running and checking nothing is ratcheting up costs. Even keeping a few gig of hard drive space adds up, even though Google can offer you gigs for "free" no problems. http://readwrite.com/2013/10/1... http://searchcloudcomputing.te... http://insights.wired.com/prof...

So why don't AWS offer fixed billing? For the same reason your cellular company doesn't. :-(

A meme is born

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hipster software" describes it perfectly. LOL. Nailed it!

But

[Ol Olsoc]

Am I supposed to think there is anything actually good about the cloud changes?

More complicated.

A trend toward moving toward "bare metal" physical boxes for the computing.

Moving to Cell phone company like who the hell knows what is what pricing.

All I know is that it seems just as likely a catastrophe in waiting, and given the state of backdooring, ain't happening if I'm a business, because every detail would be exposed.

Re:But

[phantomfive]

The primary advantage of the cloud has always been that it's cheaper (than your own hardware).
Maybe now people are choosing it because they don't have the expertise to do anything else, and so prices are rising to take advantage of their ignorance?

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd state that at any price point over about $1,000 per month you're better off having your own hardware and a part time SA.

Re:But

[phantomfive]

price point

As someone pointed out to me once, you can just say "price"

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaper ... yeah as in crappy cheaply made hardware. I've been working on helping roll out numerous cloud environments, and the stuff we're given is constantly having problems. Bad PDU's, failing drives, bad DIMMs, etc.

I'd rather continue using the mid to high end hardware that is a one time expense, and be able to maintain it than rely on machines I have no access to.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! Once your files leave your computer or private network, the world has access to your files! There can be no security or privacy for data stored "in the cloud"! I'm not a business, and "the cloud" ain't happening here!!

Re:But

[Zontar The Mindless]

But "price point" makes it sound all specialist-y and stuffs.

Re:But

[tom229]

It's not cheaper. Stop buying the lie. I've had managed service companies flat out tell me that since they started reselling cloud over internal infrastructure, their revenues have tripled. The only party this crap is good for is the guys selling it. That's why they always seem so excited about it, and anyone on the business side of things hasn't stopped prattling on about the cloud for over 5 years. The one exception would be in very small business; under 20 people.

Re:But

[phantomfive]

Well look at you, aren't you re-inventing things that are broken by smashing paradigms.

Re:But

[phantomfive]

It's not cheaper. Stop buying the lie. I've had managed service companies flat out tell me that since they started reselling cloud over internal infrastructure, their revenues have tripled.

Good point.

The one exception would be in very small business; under 20 people

To be fair, there are quite a lot of those.

Re:But

[Zontar The Mindless]

For my next trick, I'll produce something I like to call "other people's servers"...

Re:But

[phantomfive]

Make it nebulous.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not cheaper, but it is good for cash flow since there's lower capex. Good for me where I don't want to buy a 64 core machine for a 1 month project and have that cash sitting around doing nothing most of the time.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good for the people who offer migration services and middleware, they now have plenty of more things to do than optimizing and refactoring badly designed SQL databases -- more complexity means profit $$$ and more ways to bind your customers to you so you can raise prices arbitrarily!!!

The cloud is awesome!

Re: But

[Anonymous Coward]

It is NOT cheaper than having your own hardware usually, though I'll admit that it can be cheaper if your hardware designer is the sort where everything has to be the most expensive enterprise branded everything--in which case your hardware person is broken unless you actually have an environment that big. Most people don't.

Most people also don't need to scale their applications automatically, and most applications suck at handling that anyway. Yeah, I know there are plenty that need it and are good at it, and that's great, but the chief selling point of 'cloud' is scalability, and for most use cases it's irrelevant.

Which brings us to the nail you hit right on the head. Cloud providers cater to the ignorance of their customers. They provide every useless middle manager with a credit card the opportunity to look all techie to the bosses, while throwing any semblance of good or even just consistent design right out the window.

Re:But

[tom229]

IaaS has uses. All "cloud" products could have potential uses. After all, the term "cloud" is just a dullards way of describing nebulous off-site infrastructure on a network diagram. This is not a new idea. What's new is the profit motivated ideology surrounding it. There's a wide variety of considerations that need to be considered when designing information systems. The least of which should be appealing to current trends, and valuing operating expenditures over all else.

It's my opinion that the continued prevalence of this trend is due to its nature of allowing non-technical people to make technical decisions.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not cheaper. Stop buying the lie. I've had managed service companies flat out tell me that since they started reselling cloud over internal infrastructure, their revenues have tripled. The only party this crap is good for is the guys selling it. That's why they always seem so excited about it, and anyone on the business side of things hasn't stopped prattling on about the cloud for over 5 years. The one exception would be in very small business; under 20 people.

These cloud marketeers love to portray the cloud as an infinite set of computing resources - conveniently leaving out one small detail: the cloud can only get as large as the HARDWARE resources BEHIND it. Without hardware, the cloud (another fancy name for distributed computing) is basically fucking useless.

Re: But

[Anonymous Coward]

it is a point as opposed to a range.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary advantage of the cloud has always been that it's cheaper (than your own hardware).

Debatable, and highly dependent on workloads and use cases. Certainly you don't need as much cash up front, but you're really trading CapEx of OpEx.

Re:But

[ebvwfbw]

A trend toward moving toward "bare metal" physical boxes for the computing.

Not really. The trend is moving towards virtual machines. That's because almost all of the machines out there are nothing more than someone's BS project with a way over inflated value of their own self worth. I know, captain obvious moment here. They don't need a whole blade. All they really need is a 1GB X 2GHz machine running LAMP or same machine but running Win 2012 and IIS. I manage around 2500 machines. It's a U shaped curve. Probably 25 machines need serious CPU and memory. They do modeling or database work, things like that. The others are maxed out maybe one day a year. VM the suckers. When they need the HP and memory, bump them up. We can do that in about 10 minutes. Otherwise, they're a 1X2 or a 2X4. I dug into a Solaris box for CPUs recently. Box is about to fall off of maint. It's a dev box with just a web server on it - 132 processors. Gobs of memory. They want a new one just like it, of course. Getting cold in here, throw another stack of $100 bills on the fire. With Oracle, that's exactly what you're doing, throwing rolls of $100 bills at the problem.

Moving a certain department out to the web was a real eye opener for management. They had to pay by the TB of storage, Bytes up/down, CPU, memory, etc. Where they used to demand 20TB of storage, now they requested 2 TB. Where they used to ask for 512 GB memory and 32 processors, now they ask for 16 GB and 4 processors - same application, same data, etc. Apples to apples comparison. When it didn't matter and they thought they were dealing with funny money, the sky was the limit. Don't even try to figure out what you really needed, just ask for the moon. They used to get it.

Centralizing everything makes a lot of sense. You get a machine, don't have to worry about all the BS that goes into maintaining a physical machine. Where to put the sucker, power, environment... and so on. If there's a problem, where the hell is it? For most computing centers, we have say 6 or 10 modules, each about a football size. Guess where it is. Virtual machine? No problemo, I don't even have to leave my chair. Need to upgrade the hardware? No problem, just move it to another farm. Then remove that old stuff.

Unless you really need a bare metal machine, I mean you have to be able to make a honest business case (to a guy that is smarter than you are), don't do it.

Re:But

[Ol Olsoc]

A trend toward moving toward "bare metal" physical boxes for the computing.

Not really. The trend is moving towards virtual machines.

The author of the linked story disagrees with you.

Re:But

[ebvwfbw]

The author of the linked story disagrees with you.

That's fine. Not offended nor does it worry me in the least. Not the first time someone has disagreed with me. However I have an excellent track record of being right in this area. In fact being right has built my house, air planes... and so on.

Last time I was wrong was when I thought something like the Dec Alpha would take over from the I386. That really should have happened, however stupid manager type people kept on buying the inferior I386 chip. So much so that not even Intel could get people away from it with the itanium. One day we'll get away from the pentium series.

However in this case I think I can be confident. As confident, even as smug as I was when I knew Unix based systems would beat out all the Mainframe types. I have a feeling he has no clue just how far it has come in just the past 5 years. In fact I'd say if you've been out of this area for more than 3 years, you know next to nothing about Cloud stuff. As a meeting today showed, a lot of "cloud" providers are behind, by years.

Stay tuned, I think you'll see some big changes in the next couple of years.

Re:But

[ebvwfbw]

Ok... Thought I was responding to another post.

He's *NOT* disagreeing with me. They're selling more space on bare metal precisely for the reason I stated in my response. They're doing their own VM host and not using their crappy offering. I fit into that category. I run a bunch of cloud machines. I run the underlying ESXI or Openstack boxes. So I want the bare metal box and not something some guy put together and administers out of my control. Some guy that probably is a windows admin type wannabe with a few decades less experience than I have. I know this from experience and documented it. Do you have the whole blade or are you sharing it with 500 other companies over a 1G pipe. Some places really don't want to buy what they need to support the load they have.

It's going to take some time still

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

Dedicated (lease) servers go a long way even if you keep idling most of the available capacity. I think the main difference between cloud and dedicated servers is usability. Cloud is easy to use (albeit sometimes a bit *too* easy) and it's also very easy to go scale in every direction. However, a small team of knowledgeable software engineers could easily go for dedicated servers instead and save a lot of money while also making it equally scalable.

I still tend to prefer dedicated over cloud for everything else except massive backups. Backups can be GPG'd on the fly and that pretty much takes care of all the security concerns we have today regarding cloud usage in this use case. All the execs I've talked to also like the predictability we have in our budgeting. I've had the pleasure to work with some great men and women and we've always had a clear vision about the hardware requirements our solutions need now and in the future, which in turn lets us cast budgeting predictions a long way into the future.

Re:It's going to take some time still

[Dutch Gun]

Yeah, I can see that for decent-sized operations. I've actually been looking at cloud services (EC2 and Azure) lately in order to gather telemetry data from beta software, in order to help with the design and refinement process. We're such a small operation that there's no way we could or should do dedicated servers, nor would it be economical. I can actually rent the smallest server for less than $15 a month with continuous operation, and proportionally less than that if I'm only turning it on part-time, like during development and testing. Best of all, as the need arrives, I can simply scale up as needed. Both Microsoft and Amazon's offerings are roughly on par regarding pricing and services.

For all the idiocy about the cloud bandwagon and people using it inappropriately, the ability to rent and dynamically scale virtual servers on demand is actually really handy in many cases.

Re:It's going to take some time still

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still a lot of unexpected gotchas with cloud too, like network performance being tied to the cost of the server, NOT a seperate billing metric. So you have to buy a more expensive server to have a bigger pipe.

Re:It's going to take some time still

[SpectreBlofeld]

If your usage stays below a certain threshold, and Amazon T2 Micro is actually free for a year (and then it's as little as ten bucks a month or even a little less). I'm using one to test out Wiki and project management software as a test server that will eventually be installed on our company servers once approved by IT.

You all fell for it

[Anonymous Coward]

Change the name from data center to cloud and now it is a new product....how lame. put your eggs in their basket and see how many break over time. Charge twice as much for data than last year and call it a cloud.....or scam....you choose

You Won't Belive Number 4!

[Anonymous Coward]

So click baity I though I was on Tumblr.

In reality, the cloud is growing to become exactly what I expected when I first heard about the concept and pissed all over the move to cloudy everything.

Oh, it's complex to have a bunch of VMs not under you control all interconnected and providing required performance? No shit!

Custom applications that can actually scale like they promised don't exist or are REALLY hard to build and make work? No shit!

Bare metal is more performant than one of a thousand VMs on the cluster? No shit!

Nickel and dime costs for CPU, Memory, Storage, and Bandwidth can be really complicated and spiral out of control? No shit!

It's tough to budget? Especially when they won;t even show you what your bandwidth use was last month, only that you didn't exceed your tier? No shit it's tough!

Software costs are the same, no they're higher because you use more and licensing is a bitch, especially when license locked machines are replaced by new instances? No shit!

Labor costs aren't any cheaper because DevOps hipsters cost as much or more than as old fashioned admins and now that you're spinning up lots of instances, you need lots more DevOps? No shit!

Puppet/Ansible was supposed to fix everything, but they can't seem to ever get it past development and testing so production always requires manual work? No shit!

You still have no control over your data and the ability to "just get another cloud provider" didn't ever materialize, so your locked in? No shit!

Docker, portable apps running on top of VMs is slower than fuck but the hipster DevOps keep installing more of them like addicts, making costs rise and complexity skyrocket? No shit!

The cloud is turning out to not be all it was cracked up to be and you want to move back to bare metal? No shit!

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[Fikri5319]

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snydeq = InfoWorld

[Art3x]

Y'all just got trolled by snydeq's millionth article from InfoWorld.

Stupid complicated pricing, limited choices

[swb]

CenturyLink just put in fiber optic internet in my neighborhood and offers up to 1 Gbps speeds, but doesn't support static IPs. I've been using Comcast business and mostly don't mind what I pay for business class to get a /29.

I've been toying with the idea of switching to CenturyLink and running a pfsense instance on a cloud provider somewhere. Most generic Internet traffic (TV streaming, web, etc) would go out the CenturyLink dynamic IP and server traffic would get routed via IPSec to the pfsense instance to the cloud-based public IP addresses. This worked technically when I tested it with a virtual lab.

The Amazon cost estimator makes it seem mostly reasonable for compute and transit -- my actual server traffic is trivial, and even with generous CPU usage estimates it looked kind of reasonable.

The downside is that Amazon is very Linux oriented. There's a marketplace AMI for pfsense, but they want $500/year and creating your own is non-trivial. There are some FreeBSD AMIs but turning one into a working pfsense would be non-trivial as well.

I'd be tempted to try this just to kick the tires and see if the idea executed well in real life (like, no absurd latency or CPU utilization with the IPSec tunnels, etc) but I hate Netgate's AMI pricing so much I'm not even willing to shell out the $20 it would cost to run it for a week.

I'm sure there's a better place offering this or letting you install it yourself, but I can't easily find it.

Re:Stupid complicated pricing, limited choices

[whoever57]

The Amazon cost estimator makes it seem mostly reasonable for compute and transit -- my actual server traffic is trivial, and even with generous CPU usage estimates it looked kind of reasonable.

Whenever I look at costs, bandwidth costs are far higher at Amazon than at most VPS providers. I use a couple of VPSs as streaming video proxies, so bandwidth is a major consideration to me.

worthless in worthless out

[Anonymous Coward]

This post and every comment, a new low.

and all of payment options

[dimko]

are there to screw you and lock you into the permanent contract, if not now, then later.

Reevaluate

[SumterLiving]

I suppose I'm the only person in North America, and maybe the northern hemisphere, that uses the cloud to store data I want access to when out of the office and that data, if exposed, wouldn't damage my business or reputation. I must be awesome. Or maybe the cloud, like social media, is also a useful tool when used for business purposes? Guess I'll have reevaluate using the cloud because the entirety of /. has fears someone will find their research paper on subject x. When did everyone become so bitter, angry and negative about everything. I thought that was just a Republican trait in the USA

XML

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the hipsters successfully buried all the needlessly complex crap the prior (my) generation of engineers inflicted upon the world, the whole horrible XML ediface for one: XML, SOAP, XSLT etc. My hats off to them. Fuck I hated XML, and I dance on it's grave.

Would you prefer SGML? Because that was the only major alternative that was somewhat widely accepted for data exchange at the time. Everything else was generally proprietary and/or binary. Would you have preferred ASN.1?

At least XML was somewhat documented and had mechanisms for making sure it valid. It's relatively more verbose than, say, JSON, but it was also less verbose and easier to handle than what came before.

The fact it was perhaps overused in situations where it wasn't quite ideal kind of shows that there weren't many/any useful alternatives.

Not much,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still white and fluffy

since last we looked?

[superwiz]

http://www.cloudorado.com/ has been around almost as long as AWS has. It doesn't have all the providers (who can keep up with them all?), but tools for pricing these services, as a service, have been around for as long as AWS itself. It may not matter for those running a few instances, but people who have really spiky usage needed them since the beginning.

Re:dmbasso is a pedophile

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the PSA, but we're all aware now. You can go back to just stalking him when he posts.