Flash, spinning rust, cloud 'n' tape. Squeeze. Oof. Hyperconverge our storage suitcase, would you?

Re: Lenevo and Cloudistics could be a fail

This looks great, but suffers the same general problem as AzureStack.

First of all, to be honest, from a governance perspective, I don't trust Google to meet our needs. If nothing else, I don't trust Google to respect safe harbour. Microsoft has now spent years fighting the US government with regards to safe harbour issues, but Google simply provides transparency related to them. I have absolutely nothing to hide personally, but for business, I have to be vigilant with regards to peoples medical and financial records. This is not information that any company outside of my country has legal right to. That means, I can't even trust a root certificate outside this country. That also means that I can't use any identity systems controlled by any company outside of this country. That means no Google login or Azure AD. That also means no Azure Stack or GCP.

Beyond that, Cisco simply doesn't make anything even close to small enough for cloud computing anymore. They used to have the UCS-M series blades which were still too big. To run a cloud, you need a minimum of 9 nodes spread across 3 locations. The infrastructure cost of Cisco is far too high to consider this.

It's much better to have more nodes in more locations. As such we're experimenting with single board computers like Raspberry Pi (which is too underpowered but is promising) and LattePanda Alphas which are too expensive and possibly overpowered to run a cloud infrastructure.

We're looking now at Fedora (we'd choose RedHat, but don't know how to do business with them), Kubernetes, Couchbase and .NET Core. This combination seems to be among the most solid options on the market. We're also looking at OpenFaaS, but OpenFaaS is extremely heavy weight in the sense that it spins up containers for everything. Containers are insanely heavy to host a function. So we're looking into other means of isolating code.

We're walking very softly because we know that as soon as a component becomes part of our cloud, it's a permanent part which will require 20-50 years support. We need something we know will run on new hardware and have support.

Google is amazing and I'd love to use a hybrid cloud, but the problem with public clouds at all is that the money we could be spending on developers and engineers and supporting our customers is instead being burned on governance, compliance and legal. Instead, we need a full detached system which is why I was attracted by Lenevo's solution until it was clear that Cloudistics is focused only on selling to C-Level types and not to the engineers who will have to use it.