Psst. Hey. Hey you. We have to whisper this in case the cool kidz hear, but... it's OK to pull your data back from the cloud

Re: Pfft.

See https://xkcd.com/908/

Re: Yeah? sue us.

Or Boeing source code.

Oh, wait a minute.....

Read it here sometime ago:

[quote]

SysAdmins nightmare: Moving Systems to the cloud.

Giving away control while maintaining accountability.

[/quote]

Re: Yeah? sue us.

It could be just sitting out there in an unsecured S3 bucket and nobody has noticed it yet.

Re: Yeah? sue us.

At a previous employer, I worked on systems for controlling cool-houses and slaughter lines. For the cool-house sorting the time between an RFID sensor read and a decision was well under 100ms - that is roundtrip network time + processing time.

Like the brewing company, it just isn't possible to outsource that to a cloud or data centre. We had a few customers with hosted SAP, but we always ended up with an on-premises production line server, which gathered information from SAP, made decisions on the production line and sent the results back to SAP. The information from SAP was a batch process before production begin with corrections being sent during the shift, the results going back to SAP weren't time critical (if it took half a second to get to SAP, it wasn't important), but all the important decision making work was done on the local server.

Re: Yep.

Seconded!

And reversing outsourcing of systems and staff to companies abroad which, although it looked cheaper on paper, was actually more expensive due to lack of control.

Re: Yep.

Back in the 1980s our Senior Lecturer said there are decade-long cycles in the Data Processing industry to keep the computer company sales force in work. A key one is the centralisation / decentralisation flip-flop. He predicted that would continue throughout our careers.

You are proving him right, by decentralising from the cloud.

He was a very clever man, that Mr Milner.

Re: It's the future... and it will always be

Cloud will win out over time but right now isn't the 100% solution to all people.

It appears very unlikely that any single way of organizing your computing needs and resources will ever be the 100% solution to all people - at least not for very long.

In all healthy, complex ecosystems you invariably find multiple species occupying specific niches, each with nearly perfect efficiency. Most of these specialist species start out as generalists, who moved into a new niche, adapted to it, and outcompeted their generalist brethren. Conversely, an ecosystem with a single, dominant species occupying all available niches is not healthy, and liable to be disrupted by an agressive newcomer.

There is no reason to expect computing is different - after all we do have many historical examples of dominant players (or at least dominant ways of doing things) being upstaged by new technologies and new ideas. Sometimes they disappear completely; sometimes they transform themselves into a specialist, addressing a specific niche. Historically, the only thing which has been certain is that the things will change if you wait long enough.

Re: "We can't risk running that over a wide area network (WAN) link."

Insane, yes.

But given that the Cloud™ is the Panacea du Jour^also™, and since all PHBs are irrevocably drawn to Shiny, one should expect a whole bunch of insane.

Re: "We can't risk running that over a wide area network (WAN) link."

> And how many numbskulls signed off on that ?

Not a new thing. I asked the question years ago (at my employer at the time) why we were paying for multiple (costly) leased lines to a warehouse/distribution center located in the middle of nowhere. "Redundancy" was the response. "Um... you realize that, because of the site's location, those redundant lines are all on the same poles, don't you?" This was at a company who, on my first day, was running the computer at headquarters using several long extension cords running from a neighboring office because a truck had backed into the pole supplying power to the building.

Re: Not surprised

It's like buying is cheaper than renting in the long run. Who'd have thought?

Re: Beer

I thought beer was a utility?!

Re: Beer

Now all we need is for the utilities to do it.

Hahahahaha: https://new.abb.com/low-voltage/launches/us-abb-ability-edcs

- The lagging "phase shift" between whatever is cool-shiny and "decision makers" pretty much guarantees that businesses, utilities and government will buy heavily into something right about the time that the shiny-shine wears of and the concerns begin to show up :)

Isn't that just simple

Project Management

1 plan

2 implementation

3 evaluation

4 go back to 1

Re: ... remember that cloud is neither inevitable or irreversible.

Excellent post but surely you should be saving that insight for your £1000 a day senior management seminars? It doesn't do to let the helots know how the kings think.

Re: ... remember that cloud is neither inevitable or irreversible.

This has been SOP for a certain not-an-oil-company-at-all, Oh-no-the-P-doesn't-stand-for-anything - it's-just-a-P of my acquaintance for many years.

"We're not a software company. We'll outsource all the development & support work"

"Brilliant! Have a bonus! Trebles all round!"

then a few years later

"Our supplier doesn't understand our business, is not nearly responsive enough and charges an arm and a leg for everything. I say, let's set up our own internal IT department and do our development in house. We'll save millions!"

"Brilliant! Have a bonus! Trebles all round!"

Rinse and repeat, apparently forever

Re: ... remember that cloud is neither inevitable or irreversible.

You get the same benefits by just moving your workloads into VM's. Where you run those is then a matter of choice.

Re: Really?

Somebody's parents probably weren't too up on Homer. But yes, a wonderful example of reverse nominal determinism.

Re: OK to pull your data back from the cloud

So that companies that didn't have the budget for secure server rooms and a range of IT skills could still obtain the benefits.

Companies going back to on-site are presumably large enough to have those things and so don't need to pay someone else for their billing and profit overhead.

The IT manager for the charity I'm involved with is me. I know my limitations, thank you.

Re: I smell a rat

It seems a bit low but any server room will already have the UPS & AC and unlike discs or SSDs, tapes do not need to stored in strongly climate controlled conditions (although protection from extremes of temperature and humidity is essential) and don't need power or cooling when not being read or written so the running & physical storage costs are where the big savings can be made.

I'd agree on the costs of autoloaders though, perhaps if you can keep them working for a long time the cost might be amortised but high volume ones that actually work and continue working day-in day-out are not cheap.

Conversely most autoloaders will allow the drives to be upgraded so when tape technology advances the autoloaders are not redundant so some saving in the upgrade cycle might be made there.

Re: I smell a rat

So call it $250k instead of $107k. Tape media can last 30 years, but drives/media should be upgraded every 6-8 years or so to keep up with new technology - still a longer cycle than disk/flash. Tape isn't always the right solution, but do your due diligence. Heck, aren't the cloud providers offering long term storage on tape? Not that they will admit it - wink, wink.

Maybe those companies would have been better getting rid of their "specialist IT staff" at the start of the project and getting some people in that understood cloud. I rarely see a failed cloud project where the people understand how cloud works. I regularly see them fail when the people use a massive crowbar to make cloud look like on-prem...firewall appliance anyone?

"A few years down the line they have saved nothing in staff and that "fixed" monthly fee has attracted amazing unexpected and unbudgeted extras, as well as growing magically as usage is well above what was forecast."

This is exactly what happens.

This is what happened the last time buying computing as a service was the cool thing to do, and the time before.

I've been on the vendor end both times around, as well as the customer end on the first iteration, and while there are some things for which the export of your computing facilities to a vendor/service provider will work, almost invariably the problems you mention arise... along with complaints that the vendor is unresponsive and unwilling to make changes for free, on your schedule, and has an insufficient understanding of your business and unique needs.

If you have a constant, unchanging, well defined standard application that can be down unexpectedly and not cripple your work, or if you have a simple web site that you constantly play with, then exported services may well work.

For larger, more mission critical, highly interconnected ecosystems from different vendors, running less common applications, and requiring unique tuning and/or modification... it's less likely unless you are willing to part with boatloads of money.... and they'll still not be as responsive as the in- house resources you used to have.

Just another of those long term cycles in IT that keep coming around every decade or three, with new names and somewhat different enabling technology.

Re: Mission-critical should not be in the cloud...

I was talking to my new RealEstateAgent a couple weeks ago. She claimed that if her Internet connection went down for two days, her entire business would go under. She was dead serious. Needless to say I fired her.