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back to article A BOFH friendly cloud service? Shurely shome mistake...

Register now to watch our live Regcast, where we look at control and management in the cloud - and see what a BOFH-friendly cloud service would look like. Watch this video broadcast live at 11:00 BST on October 6. Handy synopsis for you No matter how open minded you are about new delivery models, there’s a bit of the BOFH in …

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  1. John70

    Damn...

    Thought it was a BOFH story :(

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    1. Bill M
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      Re: Damn...

      So did I..... Oh dear..... I think i'll go and have a curry.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem with any cloud provider is that you will not be their only client and often you will bee one of their smaller clients. Therefore when your service provider hits the wall they will have some resources working to help a massive number of people get back online and in some cases they have to do it one by one, therefore prioritising some clients. They may also find themselves in the situation where the 'repair' takes longer as they can't disrupt other clients who are up and running. There will also be a cost implication to the repair (how long do they spend recovering your services when the cost to do so is way more than they will ever make back and most of their clients are unaffected?

    On premise at least allows you to spend all you resources(and extra resources) getting just yourself up and running and cost is not an issue that a third party needs to be involved with. You can provide more accurate timescales for return to operational capacity and you can determine your own risk and DR strategy.

    Sure, the cloud service should be able to have a much more resilient offering with far better/more expensive redundancy options, but in the real world I've had more issues with cloud providers and downtime than I have with a locally hosted VM server. We still have some stuff in the cloud but everything is risk managed which leaves a lot of stuff on our premises.

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    1. Dr Who
      Reply Icon

      Depends on whether it's IaaS or SaaS. If it's true SaaS such as Salesforce.com then you are completely at the mercy of the service provider.

      If on the other hand you only need infrastructure services, say a bunch of VMs, on which to run your own applications, then just use two (or even three if you're really paranoid) different service providers and mirror your servers. Very easy, very cost effective, and extraordinarily reliable.

      We use two different UK service providers, mirror the VMs between the two and have a third location for archive backups.

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  3. <shakes head>

    th eonly BOFH cloud

    is teh one you build yourself fro the companies "old" servers and lease back to them from their own server room as an on premis cloud

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    1. SolidSquid
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      Re: th eonly BOFH cloud

      Locally cached, hardware redundancy based cloud processing solution with centrally located data centre surely?

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      1. bpfh
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        Re: the only BOFH cloud

        Powered from someone else's bill, on someone else's hosting account, contains a cache of pr0n sites, using 80% of someone else's bandwidth, contains physical site security via abuse of the fire extinguishing system, and also a combination of 1000 volts DC feed from the backup batteries through the rack frame, no earth, damp floors and in the basement for some strange reason, high powered chest freezer "big enough to hold a man" and an industrial waste shredder, already has system upgrade capacity stolen acquired at no cost, but still requests a paypal payment to the cloud hoster to "install" it, payable to simon@bofh.ntk.ne....

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BOFH-friendly cloud = RAID system you can see.

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  5. Herby

    Just remember...

    "The cloud" is defined as "Someone's computer and storage facility that you have little control of".

    Yes, you will be at the mercy of the cloud providers whims, and you had better understand exactly what the relationship means, and how to change it as necessary. Probably the best question to ask is "Who else can provide what you do, and how would I migrate if I'm not happy". You always want a second chance.

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  6. Known Hero

    We had Cloud Exchange once .....

    Backup up to two physical Data Centres on their own fibre network, we had around 200 SMB's using it.

    Boom fire in the one data centre, All mail down for about a week, and not a backup in sight, turns out that it wasn't being copied... Fuck the cloud, Never trusting it again.

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