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back to article You’ve left too many VMs lying about. You’re a very naughty boy

There’s no doubt about it: cloud computing is a leveller, both outside organisations and in. But do we really want a free-for-all democracy in which anyone can procure anything at will? And if not, how do we stop it? Back in the day, the operations staff held the keys to the kingdom. They got to decide who got what hardware, …

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  1. tiggity Silver badge

    Azure

    ”If you’re an Amazon Web Services house, you don’t necessarily want your developers spinning up services on the competing Microsoft Azure just because they have a preference for, or more experience with, that particular technology stack or service,”

    That pretty much sums up what MS want devs to do given how MS have recently gone all out on developer tools tweaks to make Azure integration really easy

    0 0 Reply
    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
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      On the other hand, if you're serious about redundancy, it seems to me that you have to have a solution ready if/when you need to switch from one to the other.

      3 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    aaah virtual server sprawl vs physical

    An easy way to make your environment complex and hard to support without trying...

    Cheap, plentiful and bypassing the datacentre heat/power and procurement purchasing controls (VM's of course are just a workflow with a cost as nothing is actually purchased according to the goblins...) take as many as you need)

    Choice of providers of IaaS and particularly SaaS should (and procurement teams don't seem to have caught on to this yet) be focussing on... How the hell do I get my data back when the contract isn't renewed or the provider goes TITSUP...

    Its not always straightforward to download a few terabytes of data, perform an ETL and upload it again to a new provider - this can be a major business change as well as technical.

    3 0 Reply
    1. David Austin
      Reply Icon

      Re: aaah virtual server sprawl vs physical

      At least in a physical environment, rogue developers have to stop eventually when co-workers and managers start tripping over boxes...

      3 0 Reply
  3. hellwig

    Hosting has a minimum cost of entry.

    It may make sense that for "Giant Corporation A (GCA)", hosting everything in the cloud is cheaper. BUT, for "Small Team A", within GCA, the costs cannot always be justified. I can buy a capable machine for $500 off the shelf, spend a day or two configuring it, make a system image, and then bam, I run that machine till it dies. Then I buy a second machine, it takes maybe an hour to restore the image and get the new machine back on the network. And I don't need to be paying engineers to do that effort either. Rinse and repeat as needed. That labor and up front cost is minimal compared to the monthly lease and up front setup cost of any hosted solution.

    "You're employer is doing it wrong", you might say, and that's probably correct, but with so many divisions under GCA, it's impossible to provide a single hosted solution that can meet all the technical, security, and licensing constraints of every program. Just because Team A and Team B both work for GCA, doesn't mean Team A and Team B can host their data in the same environment.

    3 0 Reply

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