51–60 of 67 posts
(where safely means the data controller is secure from regulatory fine).
Insanity #4; Your data could be accessed by the country the cloud host resides in. Oh, wait, that's not insane, it's the opposite. It would rather be insane to give a government that's known for wanting access to everything–legal or not– like the US your sensitive data.
This could also be a positive. If you lived in a country where you had sensitive data at risk you could store this data in a country you felt comfortable with.
The 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 bu…
And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?
Buying colocation space with a negotiated SLA that provides for reimbursement in the case of outage. And building enough redundancy into your setup that even if a location goes completely offline you're still OK. It's REALLY hard to do that when you know nothing of the hardware and infrastructure that your app sits on. It's still difficult to do when you know all the details, but it's easier to control for risks that…
I'm really not seeing the distinction here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?
If you're e-commerce and rely on the kinds of up-time numbers that the post you are responding to references, that is generally the answer, yes (Well, not a full data-center for most guys, but at least your own platform which you know down to the motherboard jumper settings or whatever).
Neither of these guarantee 100% uptime, but you can do the second one on a cloud without knowing the hardware.
Side Note: I've done e-commerce, and e-commerce typically makes all of their money around christmas. It seems crazy to me to buy super expensive HA hardware that can handle your peak xmas throughput, and leave it idle for 11 months of the year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?
> building your own data center? Or data centers, plural. Now, seriously, if you can beat their reliability, you are in the wrong business. I'll pay you to host my services.
The key is having intelligent staff who have a deep understanding of your specific environment. This guy's argument completely discounts the value of that - he's essentially saying that using PHP over writing in C is better because the PHP devs know better than you do how to make stuff work.
My experience with EC2 support staff is that they are mostly concerned with their generic setup and are of no use when anything falls outside of that, and they especially can't provide any help for your specific problems.
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. Maybe not, but it doesn't need to. Creating, maintaining, and fixing giant cl…
The point to consider is whether your IT staff can beat their uptime with your own servers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> building your own data center? Or data centers, plural. Now, seriously, if you can beat their reliability, you are in the wrong business. I'll pay you to host my services.
Amazon offers one nine of availability. I'm currently getting three on self-hosted equipment for a high-growth startup, with tens of thousands of concurrent users getting sub-second response times. The key is having intelligent staff who have a deep understanding of your specific environment. This guy's argument completely discounts the value of that - he's essentially saying that using PHP over writing in C is bette…
When you say "staff who have a deep understanding", I'm not sure what you mean. Did they pick the RAID controllers? The UPS?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying colocation space with a negotiated SLA that provides for reimbursement in the case of outage. And building enough redundancy into your setup that even if a location goes completely offline you're still OK. It's REALLY hard to do that when you know nothing of the hardware and infrastructure that your app sits on. It's still difficult to do when you know all the details, but it's easier to control for risks that…
if you have to prepare for enough redundancy for a location to go down, then the cloud works just as well. I'm really not seeing the distinction here.
Furthermore some kind of systematic problem that affects one of the datacenters run by one organization in one city is very unlikely to affect another datacenter run by another organization in another city. They're very unlikely to both make the exact same mistake and have it bite me in exactly the same way. But the AWS architecture is largely preserved even through availability zones, datacenters, etc. Easier for that to happen.
http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-m... That's an example of precisely the kind of problem that I'm referring to that wouldn't happen if you were redundant across multiple independently run datacenters.