The widespread nature of these delusions is the exact reason why most 'cloud' companies are hopeless without a sales force.
Delusions that companies have about the cloud
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#22 To put it bluntly, Google has assembled the greatest collection of computer
science talent in the world. Similarly Amazon has a multi-year lead in delivering
compute power by the drop, with which it’s happy to provide to you with the
single-digit gross margins of a successful retailer. Your IT organization simply
doesn’t rate at this level.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#23The 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.
If you look at Gmail though, one of the most successful SaaS apps, its great value for small businesses. Many don't pay for it.
Not free for anyone anymore: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/free-google-apps/
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#24The 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 customer…
The cost can be so out of whack that it can become cheaper to hire talent. Two things make this truer: the person might have spare time to do other things, and sensitivity to things that PaaS are poor at: raw processing speed, memory or SSDs.
I've seen it over and over again with SaaS: server monitoring, logs, statistics, ...
We had an internal fight recently about how to manage our logs. Group A wanted to spend thousands a month on Splunk. Group B spent a weekend setting up logstash + kibana and deploying it in production.
Server monitoring? Nagios. Stats? statsd+graphite. Even if you have to outsource setting it up, it'll probably be cheaper from the very first month.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You haven't worked in corporate IT I gather? Security and Privacy are at the bottom of the list when it comes to most businesses IT expenditure.
Unless the law mandates it and provides harsh penalties. Health care and financial companies, to name two industries, spend billions every year on security and privacy.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You haven't worked in corporate IT I gather? Security and Privacy are at the bottom of the list when it comes to most businesses IT expenditure.
Unless the law mandates it and provides harsh penalties. Health care and financial companies, to name two industries, spend billions every year on security and privacy.
Spending billions != importance, especially if as you state it's mandated by law any way.
I wouldn't disagree with you though in regards to a large proportion of companies in those two areas. I however was specifically speaking of the other industries, the majority of which still see IT as an unnecessary expense and anything more than "new password every 30 days" as an inconvenience.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#27The tl;dr version: Cloud services have exogenous risks that you can't control but trying to avoid them is wrong.
Absolutely false! If your company stands to lose $10,000/hr for every hour it's not operating (and that's a LOT of businesses) then the idea that "oh we'll just trust Amazon for this, what could possibly go wrong?!" is fairly short-sighted. Yes Amazon will work to fix things as fast as they possibly can but they sure as shit will not write you a check for $50k for their 5 hour outage.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#28My comment is still awaiting moderation. Curious, since there are other posts after I commented. Oh well, here's the repeat:
tl;dr : Disagreement != insanity. Your unwillingness to accept possibilities you haven't encountered or avoided doesn't mean those possibilities don't exist or can always be avoided.
Point #1: Bandwidth + power is sometimes cheaper than bandwidth + CPU cycle costs in many cases. If you have a massive spike, you may not worry about down time, but you will worry about the bill. There are plenty of occasions where the cost is unacceptable by comparison. And this is even after initial investment.
Point #2: If you stick to a generic storage or CPU package that needs no modification, then yes, go with the cloud. But when, you need to switch priority for some CPU threads without jumping through hoops or dynamically allocate high-priority data to primary search spaces and low-priority data to archives, then you'll suddenly find it comforting to know you have physical access to the servers and primary control interfaces.
Point #3: Evaporates quite quickly when the U.S. government says cloud data isn't technically stored by you, so they can do whatever they please with it. Since you're not the cloud provider, and it's off-site, they can claim "it's not your data" and use it as evidence. Read : Megaupload.
Don't laugh, that's an actual argument used often by them during court cases.
You store your data in the cloud and if you want it to remain private, it better be encrypted.
Bottom line: Any extra "Stuff" you add to the stack is another layer that can potentially fail. More "stuff" doesn't make a better platform, but BETTER "stuff" does.
There's something very comforting about saying "Hey, Mary. We just lost power and we're running backups. Could you make sure the generators kick in?" and hearing back, "Sure, I'm on it."
--- In addition to this comment, I'd like to point out here (since I'm not gonna wait for that comment to be approved too), there were some comments saying pretty much IT folks are shaking in their boots because the "cloud" makes them obsolete. Who do they think run the "cloud's" IT? Magical pixies?
Granted, some local IT people might be worried their jobs may no longer be needed, but if you earn your keep, your job will be safe. Or you'll have no trouble finding work elsewhere.
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#29If you're a software development team, setup multiple remotes and push to them regularly.
Totally fake, but setup a bash or whatever shell alias for this: `git push origin; git push codebase; git push github; git push gitlab-host1`
Re: Delusions that companies have about the cloud
#30> [...] If you care about the reliability, security, and the protection of your data, then you should entrust it to those who are most capable of managing it. If you believe you can match the capabilities and rigor of Google’s Security Operations team, I wish you well.
My previous employer was a mid-size life insurance company. That place didn't use any third party services mainly because it complicated all audits & compliance since data would remain on 3rd party server. I'm sure everyone trusts Google with security. The problem isn't with Google or Amazon or Heroku. The problem is with all these other cloud service providers that aren't Google, Amazon and Heroku, which are more likely to be featured on front-page news because of some rookie mistake which lead to a security breach. The author's view of this issue is for some reason limited to a few big boys in the industry.