When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For
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The AWS S3 outage last Tuesday confirmed the worst fears of many that bigger is not better. Three hours of outage for 150,000 or so websites and other services, because of some internal issues at S3. What we saw yet again yesterday was that a massive data center like S3 proved to be no more reliable than private data centers happily achieving five 9’s.
The real issue here is not that there was an outage. The outage was unfortunately just an inevitability that proves no infrastructure is invulnerable. No, the real issue is the perception that a cloud service like AWS can be made too big to fail. Instead, what we saw was that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Now, I like public cloud services and I use them often. In fact, I used Google Docs to type a draft of this very blog post. However, would I trust my business critical data to public cloud? Probably not. Maybe I am old fashioned but I have had enough issues with outages of either internet services or cloud services to make me a believer in investing in private infrastructure.
The thing about public cloud is that it offers simplicity. Just login and manage VMs or applications without ever having to worry about a hard drive failure or a power supply going wonky. And that simplicity comes at a premium with the idea that you will save money by only using what you need without having to over-provision, like you would expect to do with buying your own gear. That seems like wishful thinking to me, because in my experience, managing costs with cloud computing can be a tricky business and it can be a full-time job to make sure you aren’t spending more than you intend.
Is the cost of managing private infrastructure even more? You must buy servers, storage, hypervisors, management solutions, and backup/DR, right? Not anymore. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is about delivering infrastructure that is pre-integrated and so easy to manage that the experience of using it is the same as using cloud. In fact, just last week I talked about how it really is a private cloud solution.
What is the benefit of owning your own infrastructure? First: Control. You get to control your fate with the ability to better plan for and respond to disaster and failure, mitigating risk to your level of satisfaction. No one wants to be sitting on their hands, waiting, while their cloud provider is supposedly working hard to fix the outage. Second, Cost. Costs are more predictable with HCI and there is less over-provisioning than with traditional virtualization solutions. There are also no ongoing monthly premium costs for the third party who is supposed to be eliminating the risk of downtime.
Cloud just isn’t the indestructible castle in the sky that we were meant to believe it was. Nothing is, but with HCI, you get your own castle and you get to rule it the way you see fit. You won’t be stuck waiting to see if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put Humpty back together again.
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Yes but surely what happened was just as stupid as me buying a single HCI hardware device, putting in a rack, then complaining about how Scale is an unreliable product because I went against their recommendations and decades of conventional IT wisdom.
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@Breffni-Potter said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Yes but surely what happened was just as stupid as me buying a single HCI hardware device, putting in a rack, then complaining about how Scale is an unreliable product because I went against their recommendations and decades of conventional IT wisdom.
Or buying the full Scale HCI and then powering off all three nodes with a typo, lol.
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Yes. You own and run the castle. Including the peasants who man the gates.
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@scale said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Cloud just isn’t the indestructible castle in the sky that we were meant to believe it was
I blame the marketing for this. Every user seems to think this and the reality is it IS a better option more often than not for the normal every day user, but it doesn't make it infallible.
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@Breffni-Potter said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Yes but surely what happened was just as stupid as me buying a single HCI hardware device, putting in a rack, then complaining about how Scale is an unreliable product because I went against their recommendations and decades of conventional IT wisdom.
I get they are trying to sell a product. But not putting production data in the cloud? Come on... Just like HCI you have to properly plan a cloud deployment. That includes investigating risks and understanding the cost of risk associated with the chosen path. Saying boiler plate that the cloud is not good for production data is just silly and flies in the face of all kinds of evidence to the contrary.
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@scale
This is why I don't like the word "cloud" and I try to avoid using it. It comes down to "your stuff" on somebody else's on-prem server(s). The only thing in between is, at some places, a single wire.People see cloud as this wondrous majestic place you are always connected to where nothing bad can happen. I see it as a couple of hard drives running outside in the shed, with a little wire running out the window across the lawn from your in-door server to your shed.
I like the "cloud", I use it, and I recommend it where it's warranted... but that doesn't mean I don't see it for what it really is. ^_^
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My preference for on prem covers many of the things you mentioned, but I'd add accountability as an explicit item.
If my gear fails, I own the issue, I fix the issue, I document it & learn from it - end of story.
With "someone else's computer" (I refuse to use that word) I struggle to own it, there's nothing I can do to fix it and all I learn is to be distrustful of it (create mitigation strategies).
There are clear cut use cases for both and I do not see a future without either.
#eggsinbaskets
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@MattSpeller said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
My preference for on prem covers many of the things you mentioned, but I'd add accountability as an explicit item.
If my gear fails, I own the issue, I fix the issue, I document it & learn from it - end of story.
With "someone else's computer" (I refuse to use that word) I struggle to own it, there's nothing I can do to fix it and all I learn is to be distrustful of it (create mitigation strategies).
There are clear cut use cases for both and I do not see a future without either.
#eggsinbaskets
How is that any different in either use case? You could have easily controlled this current outage but implementing infrastructure that S3 and AWS offer, this is very much an I own it and therefore it was my issue it was down. Sure Amazon made a mistake but allowing your infrastructure to be compromised because of a vendor's mistake is no different locally or remotely. That's the same excuse as someone digging up the fiber in the front yard or a maintenance worker pulling a breaker because they didn't know what it went to.
"Cloud" means so much more the "someone else's computer" that's far too simple to really convey what a public cloud is, what it is designed to do, and how it works.
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@coliver said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
"Cloud" means so much more the "someone else's computer" that's far too simple to really convey what a public cloud is, what it is designed to do, and how it works.
Far too simple to convey what it really is? Yeah, maybe. But it is an exact description of what it ultimately boils down to.
I'm paying AWS (for instance) to provide me with computing power (their computer). All the other bits and bobs are just details.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Far too simple to convey what it really is? Yeah, maybe. But it is an exact description of what it ultimately boils down to.
Well, that is what hosted means. It's not what cloud means. Cloud computing doesn't mean that it is someone else's at all. You can implement your own cloud 100% on premises totally controlled by you if you want. Only hosted simply means "someone else's computer." Cloud means much more (and less.)
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@coliver said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
"Cloud" means so much more the "someone else's computer" that's far too simple to really convey what a public cloud is, what it is designed to do, and how it works.
Far too simple to convey what it really is? Yeah, maybe. But it is an exact description of what it ultimately boils down to.
I'm paying AWS (for instance) to provide me with computing power (their computer). All the other bits and bobs are just details.
Right, but there is more to AWS, those bits and bobs are important in how you design an application to utilize cloud computing.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
I'm paying AWS (for instance) to provide me with computing power (their computer). All the other bits and bobs are just details.
Well don't do that
AWS is not meant to be a black box. And it doesn't always mean off premises. AWS is available on-premises, too. (But boy is it expensive.) -
@scottalanmiller said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Far too simple to convey what it really is? Yeah, maybe. But it is an exact description of what it ultimately boils down to.
Well, that is what hosted means. It's not what cloud means. Cloud computing doesn't mean that it is someone else's at all. You can implement your own cloud 100% on premises totally controlled by you if you want. Only hosted simply means "someone else's computer." Cloud means much more (and less.)
Your average IT person is not going to call something a local to them a cloud...I've never even heard the term "private cloud" used in circles that I run about with. We all call it Virtualization, lol. When cloud is mentioned, hosted is assumed.
All my fellow SMB buddies aren't big enough to need a locally hosted cloud infrastructure (much less AWS). That's what KVM, Xen and such are for. If they need 'cloud' it goes to AWS.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
Your average IT person is not going to call something a local to them a cloud...I've never even heard the term "private cloud" used in circles that I run about with. We all call it Virtualization, lol. When cloud is mentioned, hosted is assumed.
That's not at all what a private cloud is. Cloud is a federally defined, very strict standard and is not related to hosting or virtualization. When cloud is mentioned in IT circles, we should be assuming cloud, not something else. IT and all of the US has a legal definition of cloud and it is not slang for hosted. In IT circles, hosted should always be used for hosted.
When people say private cloud, it doesn't imply hosted or on premises, private is about being unshared. Private vs Public, Hosted vs On Premises... these are all forms of cloud.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
All my fellow SMB buddies aren't big enough to need a locally hosted cloud infrastructure (much less AWS). That's what KVM, Xen and such are for.
None of those do cloud computing. If you need cloud, they don't fit the bill.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
I've never even heard the term "private cloud" used in circles that I run about with.
You are in a thread using it and in a community that uses it all the time. Maybe you've not read those threads or assumed that they meant something that they did not. But we talk about it regularly.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/12023/cloud-computing-term-matrix
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@scottalanmiller said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
All my fellow SMB buddies aren't big enough to need a locally hosted cloud infrastructure (much less AWS). That's what KVM, Xen and such are for.
None of those do cloud computing. If you need cloud, they don't fit the bill.
Exactly. They are virtualization platforms. I grew up hearing the term "private cloud" but it never took with me.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
I've never even heard the term "private cloud" used in circles that I run about with.
You are in a thread using it and in a community that uses it all the time. Maybe you've not read those threads or assumed that they meant something that they did not. But we talk about it regularly.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/12023/cloud-computing-term-matrix
If I see "private cloud" I automatically think virtualization a la VMware, etc, etc. A habit I see I should break, lol.
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@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@scottalanmiller said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
@dafyre said in When Cloud is Not What You Signed Up For:
All my fellow SMB buddies aren't big enough to need a locally hosted cloud infrastructure (much less AWS). That's what KVM, Xen and such are for.
None of those do cloud computing. If you need cloud, they don't fit the bill.
Exactly. They are virtualization platforms. I grew up hearing the term "private cloud" but it never took with me.
Right. But if you need a private cloud and/or an on premises cloud, none of them are cloud. But tools like vCloud and OpenStack are.
