How Increasing Cloud Reliance Affects IT Jobs 194
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.'"
Not what I signed up for (Score:3)
Great, I was hoping they'd get around to removing the last bits of enjoyment from my career before I retire. They're even ahead of schedule!
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You were lucky. At least you got to have some enjoyable bits. Nowadays it's all about system engineering and learning to use MagicDraw.
Re:Not what I signed up for (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, in a few years a new company will come along, with a great new product that will allow you to cheaply pull the information back into your organisation, handing power back to users, distributing access and design.
This will then be followed by a period of great excitement, with some people making themselves rich, but then that company will become large and bloated, creating more and more bloated systems, and then we'll be sending our information back out to a "central" system.
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In all seriousness, if you're just getting out of college, that means you have plenty of time to change direction, start over if necessary, and find some other profession that you will enjoy (at least while that one lasts; some are perennial). Not so easy when you're a quarter century into one.
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At least you got to enjoy it for a while. All my professors during my final three weeks of school at college started coming out and admitting to my sub-major group that we had spent four years studying for a profession that was en route to be obsolete by 2012 as we learned it.
Dear god I hate my college.
Count yourself very lucky that they told you that. Most people come out of college with no real experience to speak of and spend the first 6-12 months of employment learning all about the things they don't teach you in college. And that's the sort of thing you seldom get taught.
Truth is, IT management, maintenance and support is well on its way to being a commodity - which means the only way to make it work is "pile it high and sell it cheap". For many small businesses IT already is a commodity - they set u
And when the cloud goes down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your business is dead in the water.
If that only happens 2 days a year, you just factor that as a cost unless there is some critical reason you must remain up (hospital).
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
As jobs get completely slaughtered something has to give. Shorter work weeks or civil unrest.
Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the "cloud" is that you put your complete trust in
a. the cloud provider
b. the telco that connects you to the cloud
As anyone who has ever had to deal with outside vendors knows, they have no real commitment to your business. You are a single account.
When your business cannot connect to the systems, it is a crisis for your business.
For them, it is another day in the office.
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After the big earthquake in Japan we see this different. Electricity won't go out in a worldwide cloud net, compared to the servers that might be in a location that is affected by possible lights out plans ...
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As anyone who has ever had to deal with outside vendors knows, they have no real commitment to your business. You are a single account.
Except when they do. Through an SLA. Also, they have a reputation to maintain. It just isn't good business to go letting your clients flap in the wind.
Now, personally, I absolutely hate relying on outside vendors for support when I know that I have the expertise to handle most problems myself given the right access. But, to someone who doesn't have that expertise, it doesn't really matter a whole lot if the support is outside or inside the company. I don't think it is as bleak as you paint it. You can ge
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You need to be really careful about SLA's.
There are horror stories about SLA's.
For example: No more than 1% downtime per year sounds good-- but that allows them to have you down up to 3 days.
A friends million dollar printer went down. Other bigger customers with SLA's were also having problems at the same time. They got service after about 36 hours. Sure- they got some SLA fine money. Lost a lot more.
Could have ALSO happened if they had an inhouse repair person that got sick/died, etc. But SLA's are ju
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Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. These days, people at home, let alone businesses, are operating at least two active connections to the internet (cable/DSL and cellular). The internet was designed right from the start to support multiple connections so that a link can fail without anyone noticing. It seems strange to me that network outages are still a topic of debate.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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And of course, the wires from your premesis go through the same ducting - so that guy with a digger neatly cuts off both your main and backup linls.
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You can buy dual WAN failover routers for a few hundred bucks .. combine that with two cheap DSL lines, and the cloud is always in reach (provided that the two ISPs use different POPs)
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Both of them running over the same lines that one car vs telephone-pole or man with a backhoe will take out at once.
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It's amazing that people don't understand this. I work from home and have a dual-wan, only as a fail-over in case something happens on the ISP end. It doesn't do squat when the sewer company knocks off my 'tubes by 'missing the mark', so to speak.
The point of 'The Cloud' isn't to provide redundant on-demand services to a single location. The point is I can take my laptop to Panera and still have access to my files and e-mail when the power goes out in my home/business. Or even better, I can go buy a lapt
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Way cheaper for a single server perhaps, I haven't found it to be any cheaper when you're talking 5-10 servers or more. The cloud is a decent option for the ultra small and the ultra large companies out there. Anyone in between and it's still very much up in the air as to whether it is cheaper or not.
I've found the key is to have enough local infrastructure to function on your own and use cloud services to scale out. So I have a redundant database environment locally which replicates to the cloud when I ne
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The cloud is a decent option for the ultra small and the ultra large companies out there. Anyone in between and it's still very much up in the air as to whether it is cheaper or not.
Anyone doing IT should be doing some sort of "cloud" setup. By that I mean (mostly) virtualized, SAN backed and replicated to a backup site. The question most people have to consider is whether or not it is more affordable to do it yourself, or to lease resources from someone else (a "cloud" provider).
A few terabytes of space
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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...
pfSense [pfsense.org] is your friend here.
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In John's defense, he really needed to dig that ditch. And he don't understand them fancy electrical hoses, what with all their signal pumps and all.
It's about the points of failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
When the systems were in your office, you had X number of points of failure.
And you had someone on site who's job it was to make sure that those systems were available to you.
So you're moving to the "cloud" to save money ... by increasing the number of the points of failure.
So then you add additional systems to mitigate the problems that come with the "cloud". And you probably outsource the maintenance of those systems as well.
And everything is fine until there is a problem. At which point you realize that all the people who you depend upon to keep your systems working only see you as another account. If your business fails, then they're out a portion of their income (until they replace the account with another one).
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When the systems were in your office, you had X number of points of failure. And you had someone on site who's job it was to make sure that those systems were available to you. So you're moving to the "cloud" to save money ... by increasing the number of the points of failure.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that you're increasing the points of failure by moving to the cloud. Most cloud-based services are hosted in a collocation facility where the provider has controlled humidity, temperature, and multiple redundant uplinks.
Meanwhile, the average company running a mail server in a closet has tons of potential points of failure, not to mention the upkeep of the hardware.
Sure, I'd like to think that "we" can do it better than the big guys, but for 99% of the small-not-tech
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Cloud is a bit of a buzzword that isn't properly defined. The idea of a 'private cloud' is quite interesting, because it allows you to separate IT responsibilities. Some people are responsible for ensuring that there is capacity available to do stuff (but don't have to know nor care what that stuff is). Some people are responsible for making sure that the stuff that your business cares about works. If a department needs a mail server, then they can just chuck a mail server virtual appliance onto your in
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If your business fails, then they're out a portion of their income (until they replace the account with another one).
Ah, but you are forgetting the crucial point. It's not your (the middle manager's) fault that it failed, it's theirs. You discharged your responsibility with the outsourcing, er, cloud contract.
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If it's actually a cloud service (not just a server) that you're getting, then it should be distributed and backed up properly, thus reducing the single points of failure. Furthermore, it will be around multiple geographical locations, so even if a tornado comes by and takes out your physical office, the servers will still be running.
The cloud computers will also be in a professional data center with people dedicated just to keep it running. Chances are the IT guy in the office has other responsibilities,
cellular? so you are willing to pay $$$ data bill (Score:2)
Comcast Business Class NO CAP vs 4g that can have data bills that hit $10 per GB or some that slow you down after hitting as low as 30GB.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Funny)
No wonder you are having so many issues connecting to the internet.... Your connections are constantly firing pistols at each other at 10 paces.
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mod him +5 funny
You're right I misspelled that. Your comment actually made me laugh once I realized my mistake.
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Excellent point. Netflix has moved almost all of the infrastructure into Amazon AWS. If you want to buy Netflix, I'm assuming they'd hand you the keys to the AWS login and the contracts they have in place with media groups (yes, the distribution centers are a different story, go with it for the example).
What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it? And that infrastructure company sells resources cheap to anyone else in the world? You could build a Ne
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You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Isn't that true regardless of whether they host the apps in the cloud or not? It's the software that's hard to replicate. While your team tries to duplicate Netflix's software, your hardware team could be racking servers in the datacenter(s).
Netflix probably pays $200M/year or more in bandwidth costs - the cost of hardware to pump out the bandwidth pales in comparison to the bandwidth itself.
Perhaps you can save some money by going to the cloud, but at the scale of a company like Netflix, I'd be surprised i
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At that scale, though, Netflix probably negotiated a pretty sweet deal with Amazon. A flagship customer like Netflix really overcomes a lot of the objections customers may have. It's a pretty powerful answer to any company who questions whether or not Amazon can operate on an enterprise scale. Odds are, Amazon is sacrificing its profit margins, possibly even eating a loss, to host Netflix's operations.
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What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it?
I'm not sure you really "get" how services like Amazon AWS/S3 work. All they do is manage the physical infrastructure at the lowest level. You still have to write your software to use all of it and tie it together. That's where the real value lies (in terms infrastructure). Making good use of Amazon is no trivial matter.
You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Absolutely. And that's what makes services like Amazon and Terramark so compelling. The thing is, not everyone can't be successful at it. Anyone could go out and start a website for almost
Re:And when the cloud goes down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
Right now, the differentiator between you and me should not be how we store our data. Whether my data resides on a server in my office or in a databank with some outfit I can only access through my ISP, what decides it for our potential clients should be the quality of service we offer respectively, or even the types of service we offer.
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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.
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I generally have to work 9 or more hours in a day anyway. Sure, some of it is spent on /. but there are more then enough 10+ hour, "must get shit done" days to make up for the slow ones. An extra day off in a week would make me more then willing to make the other four 10 hour days.
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If that only happens 2 days a year, you just factor that as a cost unless there is some critical reason you must remain up (hospital).
Not sure I see something like a hospital move to the "cloud," but stranger things can happen. I mean, I'm pretty sure they're smart enough to realize that they can't bet everything on their internet connection. For most everyone else.. meh. It isn't like in-house systems never go down. You might have an awesome team who keeps things running like a well oiled machine, but I hardly think that's much of a candidate for moving to cloud anyway.
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
If you're relying on tools/software to "differentiate" yourself from
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1. Reliability - Cloud services still can not match well managed in-house IT for dependability IMO
2. SLAs - Anyone that has actually negotiated and enforced SLAs knows what a joke they are. Unless you get the entire month's service cost for free when they provider mis
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Your business is dead in the water.
Yes..because that sort of thing never happens when you host the services in-house.
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The difference is that a certain portion of the IT staff - the ones who train users on Microsoft's latest and greatest office suite - won't be required any more.
This is the kind of idea that will cause HUGE problems for businesses that buy into the cloud hype. How in the universe do you think that having the appli8cation hosted off site, will reduced in any way the need to train users on the software? That is just a bizarre statement. The only difference when it comes to training between an app hosted on site and one hosted on the 'cloud' is that the one on the cloud may get upgraded whether your trainers are ready to make the move or not. On site upgrades mean
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At my company they have solved this problem by no longer training people. In just about anything.
We went LIVE on SA FRIKKIN P with NO training. How can we demand 5 years experience of new people?
We will get a small training course sometime later this fall.
retrain as a lawyer (Score:5, Funny)
Sod IT, go to law school. When it's all up in the cloud and the cloud breaks there'll be a killing to be made.
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Sod IT, go to law school. When it's all up in the cloud and the cloud breaks there'll be a killing to be made.
If "killing" is what you are after, then yes.
Speaking for myself, I'd prefer to retrain as (for example) a driving instructor: at least this job won't be outsourced anytime soon and in the spare time I can write some open-source. Remember the end of the "Office space"?
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It's funny, but if you can stomach it it's not a bad idea for an engineer with a lot of industry experience.
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Don't you believe it. It's a fantastically competitive field to get into, so much so that it's quite common for reputable law schools (and for that matter law firms) to demand every applicant have perfect exam results going right back to their schooldays even if they enter the profession as a mature student many years after they left school.
Re:retrain as a lawyer (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Fuck law school, and feel sorry for the lawyers. You don't know how bad those kids have it, these days.
Nationwide, salaries for starting law school grads have been dropping steadily since 2008. The job market for JDs is utter shit, and will probably stay that way for a while. Much of the classes of 2008-09 are still looking for their first "real" jobs (i.e., requiring a laws degree, not a Starbucks' apron). Check out the numbers:
* http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_%2F_Lawyer/Salary
Tha
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Honestly, I can't even comprehend how is anything moving anymore in the US. I also can't see why would anyone who isn't already in a good IT position want to enter the field nowadays.
To the point that producing software in US will be so devalued that nobody will create anything ... except open-source?
I don't know if I like or dislike the idea.
Balderdash (Score:3)
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No, it's because "virtualization" is way too hard to spell.
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No, it's because "virtualization" is way too hard to spell.
that and v13n is hardly a buzz-word.
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The Cloud is an abstract interface, not a specific technology. It always has been. Look at some networking documents from years ago and you'll find the cloud present. The cloud services might be implemented using virtualization, but you don't care, because it is just an abstract network that you throw your bits at.
I think it is funny that we see regular people getting the concept of the cloud while technical folk, who have been using the term for decades, are trying to turn it into something new.
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The Cloud is not the same as Cloud Computing. The Cloud is this [blogspot.com] (Special note: Image is dated 1998). Somewhere in the fog is your service. You, the end user, don't care about how it works, it just does – always.
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Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts. Just because a bunch of asstards have come in and turned it into some almost meaningless buzzword that means vaguely Software as a Service doesn't mean it's always been that way. You assholes should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
You sound like the guy that used to go around correcting people about baud rates "Bullshit! Your modem isn't 28.8baud, it is 3200 baud and 28.8bps! Baud has had a very specific meaning for a very long time and now your asstards can't tell the difference between baud and bps!"
The fight is already lost, the definition of "cloud computing" is so cloudy now (pun intended) that you have to ask for clarification every time someone uses the term.
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Not to say my blood doesn't boil every time I see that commercial that somehow implicates "The Cloud" as the means by which some lady is editing digital photos, but I do know better than to spend a lot of effort trying to resist the decay o
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should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
Confusion is part and parcel of marketing, it's part of their bag of tricks. After all, confused and ill-informed people are much easier to manipulate without being detected and even if they do find out that they've been lied too, there's always another mark.
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The Cloud is an abstract interface, not a specific technology. It always has been. Look at some networking documents from years ago and you'll find the cloud present. The cloud services might be implemented using virtualization, but you don't care, because it is just an abstract network that you throw your bits at.
I think it is funny that we see regular people getting the concept of the cloud while technical folk, who have been using the term for decades, are trying to turn it into something new
LOL clouds on network diagrams ususally point to networks or systems outside of your administrative domain.
Is that all "the cloud" is?
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Yes, absolutely. But the key point is that, like the internet itself, it has to always be available and just works. Take S3, as an example. Amazon distributes your data across multiple datacenters in geographically distinct locations. Even if a couple of datacenters were blown to smithereens, your data would still show up just like it always has without you ever having known anything has happened. That is why it is shown as an abstract cloud instead of a single wire to a single computer.
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The cloud is something new!
The cloud has nothing to do with "network"!!
From a programmers point of view a cloud aware application does not need to know anything about memory, cpu and back storage.
Everything is abstracted away and virtualized independendly.
During deployment you only bind a name to a service, you don't even knwo how the service si running, that is up to the cloud provider.
The service can dynamic scale with load (increase cpu, memory etc. assigned to it) or can be capped to not exceed certain
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You know, I was pretty sure it was on a flowchart template I was given when I started work. I still have it, somewhere.
Apparently I was wrong [blogs.com], but I do recall it being used in the way you suggest, vague memories of some EDI stuff I did many years ago.
Good thing the cloud got delayed today (Score:3)
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Holy shit. Why wouldn't you just go with Openstack, KVM, or Xen at those prices?
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Because outside of trivial environments it's not a significant expense, and because VMware is the best.
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Don't know about Openstack, but KVM and Xen both suffer the same problem.
They provide you with a fairly primitive - albeit effective - toolkit. They don't provide you with a pre-cooked setup which you can just hit "Install" on and 15 minutes later, away you go. If you want to do anything flashy (for instance, put together something that competes with AWS), you are going to have to dedicate insane amounts of time to it.
If you just need virtualisation on a couple of cheapie Dell servers they're fantastic. But
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I'm curious to see what their SnS cost is now. If you've ever seen year 2 of licensing you know that it's nowhere near the purchase cost for that year of support. Honestly though, they had to do something even though this is waaaaay off the deep end.
Compared to capacity 3 years ago, we could have dropped 30%CPU lics around this year after a major blade hardware refresh from many mixed dual socket 2-4 core, 16-48GB blades to a few dual socket 6 core 96GB blades. Increased capacity and cpu on new sockets i
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Re:Good thing the cloud got delayed today (Score:5, Insightful)
My org is fairly pro SaaS but we just got hit by a half day outage with Salesforce on the golive day for a new solution that of course uses Salesforce as the user interface. That was egg on our face that we couldn't fix and which made quite a few people sit up and take notice. I'm not sure that it's a death nail for new projects being based around cloud/SaaS here but significantly more downtime and it's going to be a serious risk flagged by project sponsors and auditors.
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Exactly. all it takes is one bad event to make people retract their support.
I am not against SaaS ('cloud' annoys me) for some services. Things like EDI and anti-spam services fit very well in such a model . Data is not stored only transferred, and there is a very narrow scope which makes management easy to handle. It also reduces the scope if an outage occurs.
But when people keep saying that everything is going to be cloud based in 10 years, they just are ignoring the reality of business.
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There's a total shock... (Score:3)
You can replace thousands of jacks-of-many-trades smalltime sysadmins with a few architects and a bunch of screwdriver monkeys. ROI, here we come! (Even the confusion over what constitutes a "cloud" arguably shows the progression in finer detail: Things like EC2 only abstract away the hardware and interconnect stuff, while leaving you with the need for VM admins to actually turn the cloud into services. Things like Azure or Google's App whatever it is abstract away the sysadmins and leave you just needing the coders to write the applications. Hosted applications, webapps, 3rd-party email providers and the like abstract away the apps, and just leave you to point the client at the right URL. As soon as we all get our Chromebooks, we can fire everybody but the licensing person and the janitor, and each replacement laptop will automatically be provisioned according to the spreadsheet maintained by the licensing person as soon as the janitor plunks it on top of the RFID fob built into the desk...)
On the (very bleak) bright side, we might at least get to enjoy a little righteous schadenfreude when the axe comes for those techie-uber-libertarians who have spent years watching other peoples' creeping unemployment with the smug conviction that they are too good for that, and the peons can always retrain for the new jobs that the invisible hand of innovation will shortly be providing...
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Is a new California gold rush... (Score:3)
And "What trade secrets?" is the least of it....CEOs better start being careful about the content of the emails they send to their mistresses, 'cuz leverage is leverage.
Upon further consideration (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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I can't believe you haven't been modded insightful yet... Head on.
yep (Score:2)
Loaded and migrated well over 300 servers this year from in-house data centers to EC2. You cloud skeptics can keep denying while I keep migrating.
Re:yep (Score:4, Informative)
EC2 is not the cloud. EC2 can provide you with the tools necessary to build a cloud service, but by itself it just a datacenter full of computers. And you cannot throw your application on a few EC2 instances in the same datacenter and call it a cloud application either. That is not the cloud, that's just a networked application.
If a service cannot survive simultaneous catastrophic failures in multiple physical locations, it is not a cloud service. Without being intimately familiar with it, I would like to say that Amazon's S3 service would fit the bill for being a cloud service. Given what Amazon has said about it, it does sound like it meets the criteria of the cloud. EC2, however, does not.
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Cloud Service TCO is not all it's cracked up to be (Score:2)
Don't believe me.... run a simple sysbench and test the cpu and file io on EC2 (or your favorite cloud service) and compare it to a hosted dedicated box. In general on a similarly priced and spec-ed VM/machine you are going to find
It's not just a single cost (Score:2)
We have had this discussion with our clients, and none of them has moved to the cloud. A new business might very well be able to start with cloud services and possibly migrate some data inhouse as they grow, but most established businesses find the model prohibitive because:
Typical business view of hands-on work (Score:2)
If we all outsource all the hands-on work, that means nobody will have to do it anymore!
Seriously, this seems to be the way some business folks think. Outsource your call centers to India, and poof, no more call centers. Outsource your development to Russia, and poof, no more developers. Because it's not taken care of internally, it must be that the work doesn't happen or isn't necessary anymore.
Cost and Time (Score:2)
Managers are sick of hearing it will take 5 years to develop and 5 million dollars.
They want it done for next Thursday, for 30,000 dollars. If that entails taking on a bit of risk associated with that, I think most would say "OK cool."...
Many IT shops are bloated and inefficient, and outsource everything really technical to consultant vendors who rip off the business anyway. Take out the middle men, take out the consultant gougers.
Personally for small tasks they seem like an OK solution. However for anythin
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Oh really. How do you connect to that cloud thingy. You still need some local IT infrastructure for that.
Contractually guaranteed. Good luck with that contract, when your business depends on third party, third party fscks up and only you have is some paper.
http://e [wikipedia.org]
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Dropbox is not a cloud service provider.
It is a company providing the Dropbox service, big difference!!
How they do that, I personally don't know, perhaps they run on Amazon EC or on the Google AppEngine. Google or Amazon would be the cloud service provider in thsi case.
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Contractually guaranteed. Good luck with that contract, when your business depends on third party, third party fscks up and only you have is some paper.
Yeah, it's not like contracts are legally enforceable agreements between parties and you can sue the other side when someone breaches it. Oh wait, they are.
One would be a fool not to go with cloud services? (Score:3)
For a midsized company, one would be a fool not to go with cloud based services.
Until that close encounter between an excavator and both of your redundant Internet connections... ;-)
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For a midsized company, one would be a fool not to go with cloud based services. Cloud security has shown itself to be excellent.
Hosting providers are hacked all the time.
The only people who complain about the cloud are those with a vested interest in the old style of running things
The only people who complain about eating worms are those with vested interests in agriculture.
Kick the old server guys to the curb -- technology moves on, and businesses don't need to have server rooms anymore, just like businesses don't need TTYs and printers attached to terminals
I like economies of scale. I dislike blanket statements made from a position of extreme ignorance. You have no clue what all "midsized companies" requirements are -- keep your judgements to yourself.
Re:Blame IT for this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bite.
Scalability: Depends. Some things may scale like putting files for download with Akamai. Other things, not so much. The cloud is a tool in the architect's toolbox.
Admin payroll: Someone is going to need to architect things, so you will still have an IT department, if only to maintain your internal network links, and make sure the desktop PCs don't become botnet clients. Don't forget networking. You will need to have those fat pipes to access the cloud provider, so you will still need a space for those Cisco Nexus 7000 boxes with the clear covers.
Guarenteed SLAs: Read the contract... the SLA may not be as good as people think it might be.
Oh, and if the cloud provider goes bankrupt, the data on their servers is free for the taking by anyone who so desires. Even though it is SOP for auctions to wipe the drives, this gets forgotten or "forgotten". Promises mean nothing when some competitor in Elbonia now has your payroll (sold your employees' info to ID thieves), your client list (and is offering the same services for 50% less), your source code (with a version of your product that is exactly the same except in name), your suppliers (which are then harassed to make better deals elsewhere), and others.
No recorded breach with a cloud provider... time will tell on this one. Nothing is 100% secure. Gmail has had people report incidents, Dropbox has had the security tokens that people talked about, and so on.
No server room? I'm sorry, but even with "economies of scale", you are either paying for a data center in house, or you will be paying for one somewhere else. Don't forget regulations about physical security of data.
DB/OS versions? Sure. However, if something breaks your app's code due to an update done without notice, there is no way to roll back. ITIL 101 here.
Exchange versions? See above.
Don't assume the cloud provider has backups automatically. If someone logs on as an admin with a cloud provider and blows all your storage away, it may not be recoverable, while the old LTO-5 tape library will be able to restore data. When push comes to shove, and in some industries, you better retain data for a while (up to 50 years if dealing with the FAA), you need to pack your own parachute. I trust tape, and moving archived data to the latest archival version every couple years far more than a cloud provider's promise. However, I'm one of those "IT guys" that the parent apparently dislike, so if someone wants to be fast and loose with their data, they can store it on the cloud and assume that their storage has all the snapshot features of the EMC SAN they want to chuck.
Cloud computing is a useful tool. It won't replace server rooms anytime soon. Maybe I'm a fossil, but I rather trust a VTL, replicated SAN, or even good old fashioned tape far more than I would trust just an assurance that a cloud provider has my data backed up.
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Bravo! Your post (and the parent) neatly encapsulate both the "for" and "against" arguments. For some businesses, the points you raise will be paramount, and hence they (should, provided the PHBs don't get involved) stick with their own servers and staff.
For others, the lower initial costs will be the attraction, and hence they will go Cloud.
Depends on the needs of the business, though.
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The Cloud offers a lot of advantages over conventional IT: ...
o Actual security. There has yet to be a breach with a cloud provider.
Are you a retard?
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Yeah, you sure showed him with that plethora of examples of Amazon EC2, Rackspace's cloud services, Dell's cloud services, etc being breached. Oh wait, you didn't provide a single one.
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The cloud exists to hide infrastructure. The cloud is an abstract network. If, for example, all the service's ties to the USA die, you are automatically routed to the datacenter in Germany. You don't know or care about how it works, it just does. It doesn't fail because it is the cloud.
If you service cannot automatically deal with failure, it is not the cloud, it is just a regular node on the network.
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The cloud exists to hide infrastructure. The cloud is an abstract network. If, for example, all the service's ties to the USA die, you are automatically routed to the datacenter in Germany. You don't know or care about how it works, it just does. It doesn't fail because it is the cloud.
If you service cannot automatically deal with failure, it is not the cloud, it is just a regular node on the network
The core issue with this entire conversation is that nobody has any idea what "the cloud" is. There are only nebulous defintions and marketeers going crazy to apply a new buzzword to their datasheets.
When I hear someone say "the cloud" I immediatly think "idiot" ... The word and usage by itself is too ambiguous to have any concrete real world meaning that makes it in any way a useful term.
At least terms such as "grid computing", "hosting provider" and "Internet" convey some level of understanding.
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The cloud has always been this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_K52n2Jkv5-I/SYbEngJYXbI/AAAAAAAABVU/C_Wd8gyjaK4/s400/CLOUD.GIF [blogspot.com]
And that is still what marketers are selling the cloud as, even today. It is an abstract place where things just magically work, nothing more.