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Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

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Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire underlying layer of possible misconfigurations is absent in the cloud. Yes, the services on top of that can still be misconfigured, but you don't get access to hosts, SANs, switches, firewalls, gateways, there isn't anything for you to mess up. The shared responsibility model allows you to also pick even more robust options. But even if you were to stick to something simple, say, object storage. A bucket o…

My friend some the biggest data leaks happened because of misconfigured S3 buckets which is literally one line of code to get right. Cloud is not an insurance against incompetence.

And it opens you up to potential exposure due to mistakes at the cloud provider.

About two years ago we got an email from AWS associated with a PHD notice. It “apologized” for an issue whereby the EC2 Security Groups in a single AZ were in place but not operative. All traffic was permitted for several hours, irrespective of the SG config.

We deploy and align host-based firewalls alongside whatever the cloud provider gives us, for exactly this reason.

Somewhere along the line “the cloud” seems to have gotten a reputation for some level of infallibility of which I’m not convinced.

See also the recent problem where Entra logs weren’t captured for some tenants, and are just gone.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They negotiate network and power contracts at a scale that exceeds any typical Fortune 500 company. ..and then mark it up. AWS overall has 38% operating margin[0]. Depending on your application this can hit you really hard (cloud egress bandwidth being an especially obscene offender). > I'm skeptical that running your own data center will end up a cost saver in the long run. It's not cloud -or- your own Azure-scale…

Speaking as someone who has seen (partially) behind the hyperscale curtain, I wholeheartedly agree. Competing with an Azure, AWS, or GCP data center would absolutely be a _really_ expensive proposition, but it’s not something most Fortune 500s need (or want) to do. Hyperscaler data centers are intentionally designed to effectively be both available to (almost) every possible customer while also adhering to (almost) e…

> That so many people working in software don’t have deep hardware expertise or are not familiar with data centers plays to that hand.

I like to remind myself that AWS is 20 years old. That's an entire generation of people from devs to C-Suite that likely don't know anything else. For many of these people all they know about hardware is their laptop. All they know about bandwidth is what they pay their local ISP. All they know about storage is (maybe) USB flash drives and what Apple charges for 256GB vs 512GB.

This is not a criticism. More of a reality check to myself and others that at this point not a lot of people outside of bigger cloud and ISPs know what an Autonomous System is or what buying transit and peering costs. Nor have they bought a cabinet of bare metal or talked to a co-lo provider.

> Not a criticism, just an observation from my experiences.

Exactly!

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#63

I've directly participated in this project and all I have to say is this: the same madness that created a super complex and unmanageable environment in the cloud is now in charge of creating a super easy and manageable environment on premises. The PoC had barely been approved and there was already legacy stuff in the new production environment. Geico's IT will slow to a crawl in the next years due to the immense madn…

First you charge them to put a star on their belly, and then you can charge them to take the star off their belly!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMhmk2sWzU for anyone not in the know.
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