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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."
And loads via AJAX, and fails to load more often than not! It's too damn complicated.
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!
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
-SR
Y'all just got trolled by snydeq's millionth article from InfoWorld.
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.
are there to screw you and lock you into the permanent contract, if not now, then later.
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
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.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.