Delusions that companies have about the cloud
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#2The delusion I have, which he didn't address, is that the price/performance ratio is atrocious. Sticking with Heroku, the $3200/m Ronin DB could essentially be a 1-time purchase if you are collocating, or 1/10th the monthly price if you go dedicated.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#3Some good points but for me this misses the insider security risk of these organisations which scale doesn't help with. This could be the company acting against you or it could be an individual acting without authorisation.
Suppose you are a startup that may be of interest to Google in an acquisition, why even give them the opportunity to read your mail by using Gmail?
I also have some concerns that the stacked layers (SaaS tool, on Heroku on AWS) leaves you exposed at all these layers to a bigger pool of insiders and potential creates different opportunities for outsiders to attack although it may well still be more robust to external attack than self hosting.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#4The delusion I have, which he didn't address, is that the price/performance ratio is atrocious. Sticking with Heroku, the $3200/m Ronin DB could essentially be a 1-time purchase if you are collocating, or 1/10th the monthly price if you go dedicated.
Exactly, I have yet to find a cloud hosting service with a price that makes sense to me.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#5Some good points but for me this misses the insider security risk of these organisations which scale doesn't help with. This could be the company acting against you or it could be an individual acting without authorisation. Suppose you are a startup that may be of interest to Google in an acquisition, why even give them the opportunity to read your mail by using Gmail? I also have some concerns that the stacked layer…
His argument seems to boil down to 'give us all your data because any concerns you have are just insane!'. It really irks me to see someone dismiss privacy and security concerns with such derision. It's also not just companies who should be concerned. I think the growing unease in the EU about US access to cloud service data is only going to get more serious.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#6It's a well written article and I agree with his points and have no issues with incorporating cloud services into the work I do.
There are still two outstanding issues that prevent for now, and will continue to prevent, 100% cloud operation going into the future.
1) For the most of the work I do any connection to the Internet is not a certainty and further, thanks to sods law, is most likely absent when most needed.
Rural farms (I'm Australian) can have all access and external utilities cut off by flood and bush fire and still need to function in isolation, ditto volunteer services, remote survey groups, small bands of folks on a jolly.
2) Reliance on the continued goodwill of third parties and their governments.
Like any external service just make sure you have alternative storage for your data to ensure ongoing operations are never held up or held to ransom by .
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#7His arguments might stand for Amazon, Heroku and Google, but what about the smaller cloud vendors? Are they as trustworthy, reliant and cheap?
Even if you ignore privacy and security concerns, what do you really get for your money? The cloud ain't cheap. If the service is bad it may be easier to have a student install your web server, put in on the internet and forget about it the next few years.
And then there is there are all these cloud services you don't actually pay for, they are financed by advertising or something. You've got even less to expect there. Why not get your email account from some regional/smaller source? How can the centralization brought on by the few strong cloud vendors be better?
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#8The only beef I have with cloud/VPS hosting is the price.
Conveniently, the data center I've worked with for years[1] supports a hybrid setup, where you can use their cloud hosting combined with coloed physical hardware all in the same VLAN. It's hugely effective, since I can have physical hardware there to deal with the high-load/high-memory stuff there (like database servers) affordably, while at the same time, using VPS for less processor intensive/more ephemeral-load type stuff like webservers.
The result is that I drive to Chicago to work on hardware significantly less frequently than I previously used to, and it's fully worth it. If their cloud system goes down for whatever reason, I know their staff is on it, and I'm not worried in the slightest.
When I was 100% hardware based, I lived in a bit of terror of being out of town. If something happens, I had to get there. Now if something happens while I'm out of town, as long as I have internet access, I'm okay with it. Eventually, when prices go down enough, I'll go 100% virtual, and I'm not looking back.
[1] Steadfast Networks in Chicago: http://www.steadfast.net
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#9The delusion I have, which he didn't address, is that the price/performance ratio is atrocious. Sticking with Heroku, the $3200/m Ronin DB could essentially be a 1-time purchase if you are collocating, or 1/10th the monthly price if you go dedicated.
Does Heroku actually charge the face value prices for real customers with that level of need? I would think that discounts would readily be made available to keep the business, but I have trouble finding anecdotes from people who have spent a lot of money on Heroku.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#10The delusion I have, which he didn't address, is that the price/performance ratio is atrocious. Sticking with Heroku, the $3200/m Ronin DB could essentially be a 1-time purchase if you are collocating, or 1/10th the monthly price if you go dedicated.
The cost of the database to an enterprise is not dominated by how much the license for the software costs, the hardware costs, or the electricity costs. It is dominated by how much you have to pay in headcount to manage it. At many companies, that app would have two people whose full-time job would be "Do everything Heroku ops would do, except slower and suckier."
I get this same question from some potential customers for AR, too: "Why would I pay you $X a month when I could buy a competitor's dedicated appliance for $X and then just pay for phone calls?" "Who is going to maintain that appliance?" "What do you mean maintain?" "Like, if a security vulnerability is discovered in a technology AR uses, I stay up all night. Do you have a guy like that?" "... No." "Do you know what a guy like that costs?" "... Uh, plumber money?" "Doctor money." "Shoot."