101–110 of 223 posts
Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322
Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.
The 'experts' also made similar criticisms with the Fastly outage in 2021 and did anything obvious change as a result? In a week's time no national newspapers will be talking about this. Meanwhile, everyone that spends actual time in these areas: - Knows that running an operation at AWS scale is difficult and any armchair critism from 'experts' is exactly that. Actions speak louder than words. - Understands that the…
Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322
Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.
In a surprise to literally no one that happening on the last friday before xmas break got my "We need to secure the main comms cabinet" (which had the backup server and main ingress for WAN and was in a separate building on other side of site) item that I'd been asking about for months to the top of the list.
Still one of my favourite "outages" because I got to my desk, turned PC on, no network, walked across the landing into the main office, opened comms cabinet, plugged it back in and was "resolved" before the MD got to my desk.
The 'experts' also made similar criticisms with the Fastly outage in 2021 and did anything obvious change as a result? In a week's time no national newspapers will be talking about this. Meanwhile, everyone that spends actual time in these areas: - Knows that running an operation at AWS scale is difficult and any armchair critism from 'experts' is exactly that. Actions speak louder than words. - Understands that the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's subjective I guess, but I feel as though containerisation has greatly supported the large Cloud vendor's desire to subvert the more common model of computing... Like, before, your server was a computer, much like your desktop machine, and you programmed it much like your desktop machine. But now, people are quite happy to put their app in a Docker container and outsource all design and architecture decisions per…
Containers have nothing to do with storage. They are completely orthogonal to storage (you can use Dynamo or RedShift from EC2), and many people run Docker directly on VMs. Plenty of us still spend lots of time thinking about storage and state even with containers. Containers allow me to outsource host management . I gladly spend far less time troubleshooting cloud-init, SSH, process managers, and logging/metrics age…
Exactly.
And sure, you can use S3/Dynamo/Aurora from an EC2 box, but what would be the point of that? Just get the app running in a container, and we can look into infrastructure later.
It's a very common refrain. That's why I believe Docker is strongly to linked the development of these proprietary, cloud based models of computing, that place containerisation at the heart of an ecosystem that bastardises the classic idea of a 'server'.
The existence of S3 is one good result of this. IAM, on the other hand, can die in dumpster fire. Though it won't...
Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322
Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.
You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest.
First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative to "cloud." Many businesses, including the ones I worked for, did co-location. The companies owned their own bare metal servers, but would rent a rack in a data centre, and certain things - like the network admin - was entirely outsourced to the data centre / hosting company.
You could also rent managed bare metal servers (you still can). This means that you can pretty much outsource your entire IT department, but you're still not doing cloud services. Meaning you've got bare metal servers, someone you're paying at the hosting company is handling security updates and troubleshooting. You don't get things like auto-scaling or serverless or other cloud features, but you also don't have to worry about Jim tripping over the power cable either.
There's also still virtual servers. Which is basically a VM running on a server that hosts multiple clients.
All of this is to say that the alternative is not "cloud" or "box in a closet." The alternative is "cloud" and a ton of different server options: owned, rented, co-located, on-prem, dedicated, virtual, managed v un-managed (outsource IT vs admin your own) and the list goes on and on.
The 'experts' also made similar criticisms with the Fastly outage in 2021 and did anything obvious change as a result? In a week's time no national newspapers will be talking about this. Meanwhile, everyone that spends actual time in these areas: - Knows that running an operation at AWS scale is difficult and any armchair critism from 'experts' is exactly that. Actions speak louder than words. - Understands that the…
I think all of that is mostly irrelevant. You don't need to pay a huge cost to avoid the small benefit, you don't need every service to be resilient to this, or any of that. You just need multiple different providers so that not everyone gets screwed at once.
The 'experts' also made similar criticisms with the Fastly outage in 2021 and did anything obvious change as a result? In a week's time no national newspapers will be talking about this. Meanwhile, everyone that spends actual time in these areas: - Knows that running an operation at AWS scale is difficult and any armchair critism from 'experts' is exactly that. Actions speak louder than words. - Understands that the…
NO. From their own reports, clearly AWS is too centralized and dependent on a specific region (us-east-1) and a specific service (DynamoDB). This has been observed for well over 10 years. Why do they stay in this centralized architecture? Cloud services need much higher standards than the average corporation. Just look how they took down 2000+ services for many hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think all of that is mostly irrelevant. You don't need to pay a huge cost to avoid the small benefit, you don't need every service to be resilient to this, or any of that. You just need multiple different providers so that not everyone gets screwed at once.
Yes but we live in a highly anti-competitive monopolized world now. With more to come under the new admin.