How Increasing Cloud Reliance Affects IT Jobs

snydeq writes "Kevin Fogarty takes a look at how the rise of cloud computing will impact IT jobs, outlining which roles stand to gain prominence in the years to come, and which roles will suffer as organizations extend their commitments to the cloud. 'Ultimately the bulk of IT could look more like a projects office than the way it looks now, when most of the hands-on work is done inside. It probably won't be a total transformation, but moving into cloud, there will be more of that and less DIY.'"

Upon further consideration

[Anonymous Coward]

Private clouds will win in the end. With public clouds you get:

1. No hardware control.
a) You have no control over your server hardware. It could be running on counterfeit bits of string and chewing gum from China for all you know (try explaining that to a defense contractor).
b) You have no control over physical access to your hardware. You'd better hope the guy they hired at minimum wage to watch the door at night didn't get a better offer.
c) You have no control over bandwidth and connectivity agreements. I hope the ISPs between you and the datacenter are friendly, because a single peering dispute with you on the other side or a new and unfriendly QoS arrangement and you're fucked.

2. No cost control.
a) Presently cloud services like Amazon's do not allow you to set usage caps for your servers. A DDoS at the right time could cost you unheard-of amounts of money, your job (hey, you're responsible for this cloud thing, right?) or even bankrupt your enterprise.
b) Usage-based costs are unpredictable and will play hell with your budget forecasts.
c) Fees for everything. TANSTAAFL.

3. No data control.
a) You have no guarantee your data is securely disposed of when your cloud provider recycles its drives.
b) Your data could go missing at any time for no reason in a manner that prevents its restoration from anything but expensive offsite storage, which you're still maintaining now that you're using the cloud, right? -- As Amazon so eloquently proved.
c) What happens when your cloud provider goes out of business like Iron Mountain?

Private clouds will afford you most of the benefits with none of these problems. In the end it all boils down to money: the cloud has brought us commodity-scale computing, and you get what you pay for. If anything, I foresee a bright future in fabrics, and not the textile kind. Better brush off those networking credentials.

Re:And when the cloud goes down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am on board with shorter work weeks. A 4 day work seems adequate for most professions. Heck we could even have 4 9 hour days instead of 5 8 hour days if shaving 20% off the work week seems too big at first. I would think most people would be happier even if each workday is a bit longer.

Re:Who do you trust?

[Oceanplexian]

Failover with multiple connections is far from simple, and generally out-of-reach for most businesses. If you're hosting web services, then you need to need to acquire IPv4 space (not exactly easy nowadays), a BGP prefix, an expensive router, and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to >1 ISP that support BGP.

Alternatively, you could just get 2 cheap internet connections and a router that supports active fail-over/load balancing, however now half your address-space on the other ISP is unreachable. Not to mention that those routers cost thousands of dollars if you don't enjoy hours of BSD hacking...

So yeah, it's not that strange that bill-the-office-manager isn't running a HA configuration.

Re:retrain as a lawyer

[AtlantaSteve]

I'm a 12+ year Java developer, who recently completed a JD at a T2 law school. I was basically bored and unsatisfied in my career. I still love to code, but I've seen pretty much everything there is to see... and I spend 95% of my time in meetings or wrestling with environmental dependencies rather than coding.

However, I've stayed in I.T. regardless, because the grass is NOT greener on the other side. As with anything else in society, the top-5% of lawyers are doing great... but things are miserable for the bottom-95%. It's the worst legal job market in almost a hundred years. It can take a year or two of searching to find a legal job, and the only legal jobs available consist of soul-crushing drudgery (even by I.T. standards). Finally, the average salary for non-top-5% lawyer is about 50% below that of an experienced Java developer (who can always land a new job on a few weeks notice).

I know that the parent comment was played for sarcasm, but don't believe the hype. The legal field sucks much worse than I.T.