Gouged by cloud - but it's so convenient Most everyone believes that cloud computing is taking off in a big way. Finding agreement on why it's booming is a bit more problematic. The issue becomes particularly nettlesome for private cloud adoption, which is either heavily driven by public cloud cost management... or the exact opposite, depending on whom you ask. There …
Agility is important yes but actually price was also a factor in our moving to the cloud for our comany websites. By moving from a traditional managed datacenter to Rackspace Cloud Servers we saved about 1/3 of our monthly costs. Ok so we have to manage the cloud servers ourselves but having managed servers just meant we were spending a similar amount of time filing support tickets, resonding to emails and sitting around waiting for the datacenter guys to do the work. So we really have saved money by going cloud.
Well then what are Azure, Rackspace Cloud Servers or AWS? All of them are basically ways to host a website. I don't just mean the standard company website, we also have sites that perform financial analysis on specialised data that you could call web applications.
So what exactly is required for you to consider an application cloud?
AWS is a way for Amazon to sell you things from their online store while others cover the costs of running their global infrastructure to do so. In their case, they found a great way of running cloud services at a profit. They are the exception.
The only way I would accept cloud data storage in my organization was if I controlled the space, could dictate what countries the data was stored in and could name my own encryption method to keep it secure with no one outside of my company having the keys. And yes, I would have a full local copy just in case the provider went Tango Uniform.
its a myth that public clouds reduce the need for staff, infact to do anything more than the most trivial thing in amazon, most folks will be overwhelmed by the lack of tools, industry standards, best practices that are unique to amazon, and general lack of features. A lot of things are left to home grown glue to make basic shit work.. Some developers are really good at ops stuff, most are not, and have bought into the cloud hype to their own peril.
one of my friends told me with a straight face that the developers at his company asked if he could turn the 'auto scaling function on'. They thought that would fix their problems. If developers can be that clueless there is no hope for CxOs.
I have more to say but writing on a tablet is worse than writing drunk, fucking on screen keyboard.
If the cloud is so fantastic, its amazing that we can host all our services on either KVM virtualized servers, or physical servers (for the response time critical services), all on off the shelf hardware.
Can meet any provisioning demand within 1-3 days, all for about 1/3 - ½ of the cost off any "cloud" provider. And thats just the running costs.
Do not tell me that if we suddenly bought into the vendor-pushed cloud hype, our support and provisioning costs (in manpower) would suddenly be zero.
regards
Brian Simonsen
Ideally you want customers to stay with you for some reason other than cost.
The bonus with clouds (and indeed the main reason to use a VM as far as I can tell) is hardware independence. I can migrate to a new faster bit of kit with absolutely minimal downtime.
This is what provides agility and reduces costs - better management.
"A recent North Bridge Venture Partners survey suggests that scalability is the top reason, with business agility not far behind. Meanwhile, a KPMG survey of government IT buyers indicates that cost is the biggest reason government agencies are embracing the cloud."
Both wrong - managers think and/or trying to convince others (C-execs mostly) that it's cheaper, more scalable and more agile. They'll even produce some figures (before and after deployment) to support the claim...
All wrong - as anyone in internal IT dept. will tell you: agile? ask me how long it'll take to fix a simple problem (office 365 anyone? there login id change takes anywhere from 2 to 72 hours to take effect)?; cheaper? what about internal staff spending a lot more time dealing with problems (holding for cloud vendor support, explaining support techs things they should already know)?; scalable? not even that (not with many cloud providers anyway).
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