July 5, 2012 at 12:21 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Clouds, Costs, and Data Analytics
July 5, 2012 at 1:03 am
I think one of the major advantages of cloud services is that of resilience. I know there have been some very high profile cloud service outages in the past, but by and large there's a lot of redundancy built in to such solutions that most companies just couldn't even contemplate if buying the hardware and hosting themselves.
What I don't like is not knowing the underlying architecture my services are running off and having control over that. I'm sure you can always buy more resources, and even have burst packages which means you get more clout on your servers at busy periods which is very flexible. But when it comes to an issue of contention with other competing services and available resources are getting a bit thin on the ground - who has top trumps?
July 5, 2012 at 1:41 am
The cloud will eventually mature.
At present I think of it as Pay-As-You-Go computing. If you have a facility that you need regularly or occassionaly but not all the time then it can save you a lot of money.
If you are using something 24/7 then it can work out very expensive.
One challenge with data is that it is shared. You may start off with a pool of data being used for a specific purpose and a PAYG model is fine but along comes another requirement that radically alters the usage profile and you get a nasty shock when the bills come in!
With data analytics you have to be careful where you host your components. If your analytics tool is co-located with your data then fantastic. If you have a locally hosted analytics tool looking at a cloud source then you are going to be (trying to be) shifting massive amounts of data from the cloud to your local compute resource.
Similarly, if you have a nice analytics stack the identifies customer segments along comes a marketeer that says "great, grab me all the data from segment 'X' so I can contact them! Again, you have got a sudden big data shift operation going on and the bills stack up!
July 5, 2012 at 9:32 am
The other challenge is understanding what you use. I've always hated the $$/MB charges for phones for a couple reasons. One is that I have no idea how much MB I'm using on a regular basis. The second is that I have no control. I can load a page on a site that's 100kb or 10MB.
July 6, 2012 at 7:50 am
Cloud computing is just another executive buzz word Ponzi scheme to con a bunch of money out of the everyday honest IT/DBA/Developer workman. Let's join the cloud AND fire a bunch of our IT/DEV people. Just replace the word cloud with IBM and you can resubmitt all the same projects from the 1960's and 70's. Cloud is just the nerdie step son of DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING using "virtual" hardware resources that utilize "virtual" over subscription technology. The Cloud's "virtual" Ponzi resource revolution is a cloud of salesman who must sell more to actually fullfill what they sold and are implementing. I expect clouds to suffer from the same sort of economics that create buzz word bubbles. I expect we will see a long list of losers with one or three actual working Clouds winners, excluding all the artificial governmental Cloud winners.
July 6, 2012 at 9:35 am
thadeushuck (7/6/2012)
Cloud computing is just another executive buzz word Ponzi scheme to con a bunch of money out of the everyday honest IT/DBA/Developer workman. Let's join the cloud AND fire a bunch of our IT/DEV people. Just replace the word cloud with IBM and you can resubmit all the same projects from the 1960's and 70's. Cloud is just the nerdie step son of DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING using "virtual" hardware resources that utilize "virtual" over subscription technology. The Cloud's "virtual" Ponzi resource revolution is a cloud of salesman who must sell more to actually fulfill what they sold and are implementing. I expect clouds to suffer from the same sort of economics that create buzz word bubbles. I expect we will see a long list of losers with one or three actual working Clouds winners, excluding all the artificial governmental Cloud winners.
I'm not sure I agree with much of that. There's some places that are hyping something that isn't new (co-location/renting machines), but there are things that are new. If you look at the Azure or AWS architectures, these aren't the same thing that's been available for years. The press is hyping it, and many people are making it seem "easy" to do, but it's not. Done right, however, it can offer a number of advantages to applications. DR/HA built in, applications that scale up, not only in performance, but cost.
There will be some people that sell something fraudulently, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
July 6, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Rebranding distributed computing, calling it a "cloud" is a huge marketing success but it doesn't take an evil genius to realize this "cloud" stuff suffers from the same fundamental flaws that it's predecessors did. First off, you lose control and transparency of your systems and data. Next you reduce inhouse expertise for outhouse support. Lastly in a few years, when the cloud buzz is over and reality hits, if you want out you can not get out without a huge cost penalty. Sounds a bit like an Oracle database I once supported, I bet cloud monkeys get paid 40% more than what an inhouse IT monkey gets. I guess I will prostitute my bad vibes on this buzz word and add it to my resume. I could use more bananas 🙂
July 8, 2012 at 10:27 am
I have to say that I find the ability to resync my Kindle invaluable. Most of the stuff I want to do in the cloud is light-weight consumer stuff and not enterprise grade work.
Storing basic stuff in the cloud is useful provided I don't want to store private data and the latency and availability are of mintor concern.
One thing that does worry me about the cloud is data destruction. How can I be sure that data I want destroyed is destroyed?
Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply