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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#221

Post by themartorana »

fche wrote: post #213
asuffield wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is something you have to compare, and can combine in interesting ways, then trade off against costs. There are a bunch of ways in which you can do compute, storage, and networking. You get to pick zero or more of these ways. One of them is "buy a bunch of iron and ma…

There should exist an option that is between those spectrum endpoints. One that runs a lot more free (inspectable, trustworthy) software than present cloud services. One that leaves some control with the owner of the data.

There does - in fact, there exists every single percentage of difference between servers-in-bedroom to full-Azure/AWS. We run full AWS. The company one floor up runs their own OpenStack private cloud on colocated servers in a Level 3 facility. Want to rent and not own? You can have that, too. Softlayer is somewhere in-between there.

There exists just about every price point and combination of services you can imagine. It's awesome, too, because I can grow a business and can enter into the market with a whole "rack" of servers for almost no cost at all.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#222

Post by iofj »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #211
iofj wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they los…

You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "gett…

I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over.

So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything.

Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?".

Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ?

> You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures.

I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#223

Post by lkbm »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #211
iofj wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they los…

You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "gett…

Your statements about UPS and Netflix are absolutely true, and if you're Netflix or Amazon, that's a great comfort. It's less of a comfort to non-gorillas. Yes, Amazon has to be reliable or Netflix will find someone else, but being reliable and accountable to Netflix doesn't 100% translate to being 100% reliable and accountable to my puny business. We'll reap a lot of benefits, as it translates to a great extent, but not as completely as you seem to be implying.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#224

Post by lmm »

rsync wrote: post #219
lmm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care who does the calculation and how many nines they come up with - if you load FreeBSD on two bare metal servers and put them in two different datacenters and run them with any kind of conservative and cautious sysadminning you'll have a better solution. Yes, it will be more expensive.[1][2] Nonsense. It's very easy to have that kind of setup fail - remove one from the load balancer, take it down for main…

"Nonsense. It's very easy to have that kind of setup fail - remove one from the load balancer" I'm sorry - you're already missing the point. There is no load balancer . There's no firewall. There's no services running except for sshd. I guess I should qualify what I mean by "better", though. What I mean is, "I know exactly how this will fail and it won't be interesting or surprising. Or take any thought or time to fi…

If there's no load balancer then is the second machine just a warm spare? Do you get paged to get up and reconfigure things when the first one fails in the middle of the night?

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#225

Post by dspillett »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #75
dspillett wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> demonstrate that ... on a number of cloud platforms ... that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage You seem to be missing the point. People are not saying "don't use cloud storage at all " They are saying "don't use cloud storage exclusively " You might trust that your cloud providers will never be hacked, that your individual account on them will never be hacked, that they…

>For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite. But the fact remains that where ever you choose to put it "offline and offsite" the odds of it being lost are orders of magnitude greater then its persistent and redundant storage on a reputable cloud provider. Even if you put it on the most stable storage you can find and lock it in a underground safe. You can't guarantee its integri…

> To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks"

Money and data are not directly compatible here, as one "bit" of money is the same as any other in most respects, but I do always carry a minimum amount of cash in case my cards stop working or are lost/stolen, have a pot of "emergency cash" at home for similar reasons, and recommend others do the same. Most of my money is in the bank so I'm not protecting against massive institutional failure here, but I am protecting myself against a variety of possible temporary inconveniences and possible mistakes on my part.

I'd rather have two backups of which one is more likely to fail then the other than just one, or three rather than two, and mixing types of backups means not all of them are subject to exactly the same failure modes (my local backups, online or off, are unaffected by connectivity issues for instance). For data that is important, a little paranoia is healthy IMO.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#226

Post by BookmarkSaver »

lkbm wrote: post #223
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "gett…

Your statements about UPS and Netflix are absolutely true, and if you're Netflix or Amazon, that's a great comfort. It's less of a comfort to non-gorillas. Yes, Amazon has to be reliable or Netflix will find someone else, but being reliable and accountable to Netflix doesn't 100% translate to being 100% reliable and accountable to my puny business. We'll reap a lot of benefits, as it translates to a great extent, but…

I somewhat disagree here. There is heavy competition, and Amazon might be ahead of the pack, but for most puny businesses there are alternatives. One serious screwup and all of those puny businesses would abandon Amazon for something else, because the other major players would publish it everywhere.

The Netflix/Amazon relationship reminds of the "you owe the bank $100, the bank is your problem, you owe the bank $1bil, you are the bank's problem" sentiment. Netflix is probably such a big business that they are dependent on each other.

On the other hand, Amazon seriously screwing a small business would be like a bank failing a normal customer's withdrawal from their deposit. The second that information went public, the bank would essentially be dead.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#227

Post by BookmarkSaver »

iofj wrote: post #222
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "gett…

I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use thei…

Again, you are tunneling...

I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses in general depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all.

You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general.

Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#228

Post by ixtli »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #217
ixtli wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are an adult. If you miss the message for the messenger you've got no one to blame but yourself.

So is textfiles an adult. If he/she is a jerk, he/she has nobody else to blame.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said. While it is certainly the case that one can catch more flies with honey, I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us. This isn't about textfile's delivery, but that it's useless bordering on childish to take a response from an author and respond simply with "I don't like your tone."

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#229

Post by brennen »

textfiles wrote: post #201

Salutations, ass-end of the Tech Elite. As someone who has generated a pretty hefty sandbag of verbiage over my decades online, it's always amusing to see what the Grand Eye of internet arbitration decides is an incredibly important and pertinent subject to discuss in my back catalog. Whether it's my work in guiding volunteers for in-browser emulation ( http://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary ), my delightful cote…

Thanks for this.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#230

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ixtli wrote: post #228
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is textfiles an adult. If he/she is a jerk, he/she has nobody else to blame.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said. While it is certainly the case that one can catch more flies with honey, I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us. This isn't about textfile's delivery, but that it's useless bordering on childish to take a response from an author and respond simply with "I don't like your tone…

> I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us.

That would be good, yes. We should all try to be like that. However, HN has guidelines as well, and I'm pretty sure that textfile's post violated some of them. And the way HN maintains it's status as the kind of place where we care about the message is partly by discouraging statements that needlessly distract with an offensive tone.

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