You care about TIN? Why the Open Compute Project is irrelevant

the missing parts

Where's the internet infrastructure going to come from, or is this spiel specific to a certain area with extraordinary uptimes? Many countries have real problems with net stability. Some countries are really bad, but it's not that good here in Canada either. Should one not count the cost of downtime?

Blah, blah, blah. Sounds like a load of marketing to me. If the cloud would solve all problems, we would not have any other DCs left by now. When I talk to my customers, do the calculations of what it will cost, including transfer fees, migration from one cloud to another, factor in downtime etc. etc. Using the cloud for core enterprise workloads is not going to cut it.

However! Small, agile startups, why not? Some test and dev, also sounds like a good choice. One thing is certain though, moving everything to cloud provider X, will give you a nightmare once you need to move to provider Y.

Quality does not seem to be a metric of consideration.

Quality does not seem to be a metric of consideration - it never was, never is and never will be in cloud which is what OCP and the like are aimed at. You are supposed to deliver _THAT_ at the software HA layer, not by gold-plating the hardware. A person who is lamenting about the lack of it has seriously missed the plot. By miles.

I know

that I can operate data center stuff much better than amazon, microsoft, google etc as I have demonstrated for the past decade.

They operate stuff pretty well *only if* you're willing and able to change your operating model significantly to fit in their "built to fail" model. Most apps, most orgs do not operate in that model, and sadly many people making the decisions don't realize this when they make those kinds of decisions. I maintain that every development team I have worked with, every company I have worked for has been this way, and the same goes for many others that I know others work at. Most people think cloud is just magic and it will "just work". This is probably closer to reality for SaaS (since everything is abstracted), couldn't be farther from the truth for IaaS (and really who uses PaaS yet these days).

(both my current company and previous company launched their ground-up designed apps in a big public cloud with pretty disastrous results(first and foremost from a cost standpoint setting everything else aside), first company collapsed after I left they were spending easily $400k/mo on cloud hosting(I could do it all in house for around $1M of first year costs and about $150k/year after using tier 1 hardware and software), current company moved out in a few months and I operate their stuff still today, runs smooth as butter, I've had two, count em two server failures in 3.5 years(both recovered automatically), 100% storage uptime in 3.5 years, everyone sleeps well at night - haven't had to rebuild a virtual machine since we moved to the data center 3.5 years ago)

The models are different. The model I work with provides higher levels of performance, availability, and generally significantly lower costs(though haven't priced clouds out in the past couple of years) because we know how to oversubscribe and share resources(doing this right takes experience). It's not as flashy, there are no APIs to dynamically scale up and down, that is a manual process (but realistically we haven't had this need, ever), lifetime of servers is measured in years. We have tons more functionality with our enterprise equipment than possible in a public cloud(I'm not going to bother explaining the details if you don't understand this, not worth my time).

Their model is you have to build your apps to handle that. On paper it sounds smart, but in reality that is a lot of work, most companies opt to build features for customers rather than high availability.

OCP to me is kind of dangerous, I know there are also a lot of people out there (I used to work for one) who just look for any excuse to cut corners on cost, not taking into account the risks involved in going with lower quality stuff ("it's all the same"). If you have the staff and expertise (and time) to handle it, great go for it. Most companies don't(none that I have worked for anyway, I work for small(er) companies).

One company I was at tried adopting this model saying "oh we'll just hire an intern to swap hard disks" for a big hadoop cluster they were going to do. They ignored my suggestions and I left before they bought anything. The first round of cluster build out had 30-40% failure rate on systems for the first year or so(literally halving their hadoop capacity which impacted business because hadoop operates on a quorum model apparently the lead developer explained it to me a year or two after), they never hired interns to "swap hard disks". The leader of the group left not too long after. Company is still around but I heard all investors have pulled out and they are riding on their own(not a position I would want to be in given they went through probably 8 rounds of funding).

I think cloud is a future, but that future is SaaS. IaaS is still a piece of shit when it comes to cloud, I don't really see it getting any better (at least in the biggest clouds). SaaS makes a lot of sense though.

lastly, I still recommend this plugin it makes reading about cloud more enjoyable

https://addons.mozilla.org/En-uS/firefox/addon/cloud-to-butt-plus/

(there is one for chrome too I don't use chrome though)

(maybe the plugin altered my comments to my butt I am not sure)

Misses the point

So of course running a data centre efficiently is hard, no one said it was easy and this:

“The type of work and focus needed to run a data center effectively is very different than running a short-term project. A data centre requires day in and day out focus on being perfect and making marginal improvements, while avoiding risk to production operations.”

is stating the bleeding obvious and treating most people like idiots.

Most people who look at ARM, and exotic projects (for tin) already have a sizeable invest in the data centre (one way or another). So really stop treating them like children.

Also you forgot the point of Pay for provision on the cloud (run 24x7 as day to day data centre) and pay per drink (only turn on when you need it).

Nordstroms don't do internal data centers anymore?

So scratch off Nordstroms as a place to shop. Unless it's cash only.

More link bait from Asay

In every article he writes, Asay would like us to believe that applications are the center of the enterprise universe.

They are not.

Nordstroms does not sell more stuff because of their applications. They sell more stuff because of their business processes (which may include applications). Simply, Nordstroms does not see value in IT the same way Walmart does - and that is OK. Different companies view IT differently. Walmart uses their IT as a competitive advantage for the business processes - value they could not get from AWS. Point is, not all businesses are going to find value by running their IT in a public cloud. Some will. But applications, by themselves, do not define business value.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google?

You do know that there are other IaaS/PaaS companies out there at least as good and at least as cheap as those three, right? And the ones that aren't US-based don't give your data to the NSA either.

Oooh .. another advert ...

... for putting all your eggs in someone else's basket.

For a while I made a decent living rescuing people from failed hosting companies and setting them up with their own kit. To my knowledge only one of the firms that did this has scrapped their in-house servers .. and that was because they got bought and started using the buyers in-house servers instead.

Maybe there should be a register of interests for IT journos as well as MPs.