back to article Getting to the bottom of the cloud debate

We've put up with relentless marketing and promotion of cloud for over five years now, but how much has the world really moved on? Money is clearly changing hands for various hosted services and cloudy technologies, and some suppliers seem to be doing pretty well out of this. And yet when we survey you, Vulture readers, you …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    Well ...

    ... I've been making money pulling businesses out of "the cloud" (whatever that means) for over four years now.

    I'd say that "the cloud" is a marketing meme that is long past its sell-by date.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In a word: overpriced

    It's overpriced for most purposes but the advertising BS sells it as cost-effective by quoting the lowest common denominator figures of £x/day rental, like all the on-demand services do, gas, electric, phone, etc. Maybe it is in tiny quantities but you start trying to ramp up a couple of boxed with 8+ cores each and more than 64GB and you'll find your IT budget going up in smoke very, very rapidly!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Only useful for non critical things

    One of our clients came up with the idea of moving some of the machinary control programs to the cloud when we said they needed another server. That is until we pulled the plug on the running servers to show them what would happen if the cloud dissipated (we had made arrangements with the shop floor for the demonstration to management so nothing was broken or damaged).

    They ended up with 4 new servers in mirror failover.

  4. Nezumi
    Thumb Down

    Marketing and salesdroids want to sell cloud. We don't want to buy it.

    A couple of IT managers I work with went to an MS technology conference. It was all cloud with no on-prem' even mentioned. They got up and left.

    I work for a very large UK health provider. You can probably guess which one.

    Frankly our particular organisation doesn't feel that we can get the level of resilience, security and data confidentiality we require. Well, we can but for us on-prem' is more cost effective. Of course YMMV, however as a user of our services we hope that you feel safer and more secure knowing we hold all data locally.

    1. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: Marketing and salesdroids want to sell cloud. We don't want to buy it.

      Doesn't really matter where you hold the data if the password is "Password123" and written on a post-it note attached to the permanently logged in as Administrator PC.

      Which seems to be most healthcare provider's definition of secure, confidential and resilient.

  5. foo_bar_baz
    Mushroom

    Friends don't let friends have servers

    There is really only one question to ask: Public cloud (AWS) or private cloud (OpenStack). If your answer is "neither", you're probably a dinosaur or have a very specific set of circumstances.

    There may be legitimate reasons for running your own server infrastructure, but most often it boils down to "we're afraid of change", "we're afraid for our jobs", or people simply don't understand the possibilities. Renting or running your own virtual servers does not a cloud make.

    I challenge you to stand up and say you do a better and more professional job at running secure and resilient infrastructure than the people at, let's say Amazon, Google or Microsoft. That's some hubris.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Friends don't let friends have servers

      My servers had better uptime than Amazon/Google cloud

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. foo_bar_baz
        FAIL

        Re: Friends don't let friends have servers

        Great.

        Now set me up a test environment consisting of geographically redundant databases, terabyte scale file storage, a fleet of application servers and a web tier fronted by load balancers and a global content delivery network. Deploy my application to it. You have 20 minutes.

        OK, I've run my tests. Please destroy it all.

        Now set it up again for a new round of tests. Then be so kind to replicate the entire infrastructure to datacenters on each continent for production.

        How's it going? Still updating the BIOS on that blade server? I'm here on the North Pole with a laptop and a ropy satellite connection, yet I'm designing and deploying global infrastructure at a whim.

        I'm sorry but anyone developing software or an online service is likely to regard IT departments as mere roadblocks and amateurs compared to what AWS (yes, even Azure) can offer. I say this grudgingly as I've got a sys admin background myself, but the harsh reality is they're right. Knowing how to optimize for performance or being good at hardening a server is not what will let you keep your job. It's being able to do it on 1000 machines at once.

      3. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: Friends don't let friends have servers

        Bet they don't. Or if they do only due to luck.

        *One* of your servers may have better uptime than *all* of AWS, but that's not the same.

      4. jillesvangurp

        Re: Friends don't let friends have servers

        That's great. My amazon servers get replaced automatically across three different availability zones when they fail. Cloudformation gets humans out of the loop here completely. I don't actually care about individual server uptime. The whole point of cloud is to spin up enough vms to be able to deal with the eventuality of any of them failing as a routine event. AZ failures are rare, entire regions even more rare. But granted, if Amazon Ireland fails in all three AZs, we have an issue. On the other hand, I don't work for the kind of company that can put in place the necessary investments to match or exceed their availability. I know few companies that do and many that are simply faking it by buying plausible deniability from the usual IT snake oil sellers.

        Most companies I know that own in house hardware, tend to have very expensive/disruptive failures and outages due to equipment failures, staff incompetence, software bugs, failing infrastructure management, and lengthy bickering between service providers and staff when that happens and very tedious processes around provisioning even the most basic of things due to cost controls, silly processes, etc. Also, I'm aware of companies ridiculously over provisioning their hardware, buying the wrong stuff for the wrong job and running software on the wrong hardware because it was there.

  6. Oh Homer
    Paris Hilton

    Great ... if you live in the middle of London

    Or actually, from what I've heard about London's abysmal network speeds, maybe not even there.

    As for my muddy backwater... I once calculated that it would take me over a year to upload my first full backup to the Cloud.

    Post-Snowden considerations don't even enter into it.

    Then there's the price. For what it costs to watch my data crawl up to the NSA's Cloud service provider's servers every year, I could probably buy double the storage space in HDDs, with the added benefit of 6Gbps SATA transfer rates ... and get to keep that storage forever, rather than just "rent" it annually.

    Sorry, I just don't get it. I can't even see how this could make any sense to businesses, much less individuals.

  7. Mage Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Cloud

    Only makes any sense to massively online or geographically dispersed operations.

    The bulk of people and IT is actually SME, where the loss of the interconnection or arrogance of a Cloud Megacorp might mean the end of their business. For them the Cloud is just 1960s to 1980s rented offsite servers owned by someone else. For the majority, then the Cloud is a backward step that will cost them more (if there is proper backups etc). Even the connectivity to cloud could cost the majority of SME more than running their own IT. They'd still need in house IT staff even with the Cloud.

    1. foo_bar_baz

      Re: Cloud

      You've hit the nail on the head. Moving your legacy J2EE accounting service running atop Oracle from your server cabinet to a rented virtual server is not cloud. Cloud is about replacing that application entirely and buying it as a service. It's about cutting out the cost of running a server in every office and having an IT guy looking after it.

      "What if we get an Internet connection issue and can't pay our bills", you cry. You have a plan, just like you should have a plan for the eventuality of a power cut. Turning the question on its head, what if you have a burglary or a fire? Why should your business be dependent on the physical integrity of your office? I'll rather trust my core business to a collection of professionally run datacenters across the continent.

      Many core premises of onsite IT are being eroded.

      1) Connectivity is improving. With unmetered 4G being the norm in progressive countries, you have the situation where your phone has a faster internet connection than the office LAN.

      2) Geography is less important. Not everyone is working in the same office. Increasingly they may be on the road, working from home, or contracting from another country.

      3) Online services are competing with in local services. Those services you are running are being replaced by cheaper alternatives like Gmail, Office 365, Azure Active Directory etc.

      Obviously the IT guy will have a hard time accepting the state of things, but it's the way we're going. Deal with it, and adapt.

  8. John Crisp

    Cloud. Only on rainy days

    Sorry your superfast 10mb internet connection has failed. We promise to get you an engineer to look at it within 48 working hours (Mon-Fri 9-5 only).

    After we have got the permits from the electricity board to do the work as the line is within 100 metres of a pylon.

    And the electricity board has then trained and certified our engineers to work near said electricity cables.

    We'd dig up the road, but you know how long that will take with council permissions

    (I jest slightly but had something like this recently and the fix took 6 months)

    You can't work? Is that meant to be our problem?

    Of course you can get another provider. They'll still have to use the same cruddy 100 year old copper that we supply and can't be arsed to replace.

    Fibre? ROFLMAO.

    FTC? This century? Are you a gambling man? This is 21st century Brexit Britain. You aren't in a galaxy far far away......

    Cloud... all well and good if you can connect to the damn thing....

    Not throwing out my metal boxes just yet..... saved my life countless times

    NB... they HAVE to fix a standard POTS phone line PDQ. But ADSL has different rules and is supplied solely on an 'as and when convenient' to them basis with no guarantees, and that is a 'business' service.....

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You say cloud...

    I say skynet Snoopers Charter...

    1. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: You say cloud...

      Why is that an issue? You are encrypting your data? Oh, you're not - well in that case maybe you should put your own house in order.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When people talk about problems with The Cloud its usually something of a technical nature. IMO the biggest issue with The Cloud is Political. In the US companies and individuals who store data in The Cloud are subject to Third Party Doctrine.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

    It was amazing with all the hoopla surrounding Hillary Clinton's email no one seemed to realize why she ran a private Email server or why her opponents were unable to get a hold of her emails. The answer is... Third Party Doctrine, of which she wasn't subjected to. And yet large corporations, military contractors, financial institutions etc. cheerfully store their data in The Cloud without a thought.

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