May 7, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item There cometh a shower
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 7, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Eh, the Cloud will become like electricity. One day we won't even think about it but it will be integral to daily life. Outages and breaches will occasionally happen but we will live with it. Software vendors like Microsoft won't even sell packaged software (even games) because it will all be SaaS. Big organizations might continue to run their own internal clouds using Cloud appliances. These appliances will integrate seamlessly with public clouds where it makes sense to do so.
I'm not in love with the Cloud. Far from it. However, it's clear where the industry and paradigm is headed and it's straight to The Cloud.
James Stover, McDBA
May 8, 2011 at 3:53 am
The cloud will certainly become like the power utility providers, or phone companies from which we will buy our services. My only quibble is that it is probably wrong to believe that the cloud 'per se' is already intrinsically secure and reliable. My advice to any pioneers would be to look at the label. Some Cloud providers have invested a huge effort into providing a resilient and secure infrastructure, and others haven't. The people with the job of implementing the vision still haven't quite caught up with the marketing hyperbole. We've been sold a dream which will certainly soon become a reality, but not quite yet.
The doubts I've expressed in this editorial about the cloud as it exists today is in addition to the concerns I've had already about the suitability of the cloud for financial data in view of the existing legislation. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/70095/
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
May 9, 2011 at 4:03 am
I have been saying to people for some time now, the problem with clouds, is they tend to blow away.
May 9, 2011 at 7:26 am
i read on some internet forum last year when amazon was having issues that the only way to make money as a cloud provider is to oversubscribe. looked up amazon's pricing and confirmed it
take a regular HP Proliant DL 380G7 server. it will run you around $13,000 in a nice configuration. price out a high performance server on Amazon and by the time you pay for incoming and outgoing data you'll be paying $6000 a year or more
reason is simple. my physical server will have a RAID 1 for the OS on cheap HP drives. Amazon has to have redundancy and everything is probably on expensive SAN storage for redundancy so they have to have twice the horsepower on their end. of course the MBA's hate unused hardware since it messes up ROI and other ratios so they will sell space on the redundant hardware as well
the whole cloud fad is just a repeat of the Application Service Providers of the late 1990's. most of them went out of business and liquidators were selling hardware on ebay for years after the 2000 bubble
May 10, 2011 at 7:31 am
Cloud computing is just re-centralization, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that.
As already mentioned, it's like electricity. You can have your own power plant (there's motion in that direction with regards to solar powered houses and such), or you can depend on someone else to provide power to you. (There's really interesting history on the point of a national power grid. One of the key reasons it exists is because Thomas Edison made a bigger profit off of it than off of localized power production, due to conflicts between his patents and Tesla's patents. Edison hired better thugs, so we have a national power grid. Not the whole story, but definitely a significant portion of it.)
There are plus/minus points to having your own servers, and different plus/minus points to paying someone else to do your servers for you.
As for the idea that packaged software will disappear, I can see that with commodity software, like word processing and spreadsheets, but there's going to still be a big market for local computing power when it comes to graphics-heavy gaming, or things like video editing, CGI, 3D rendering, CAD, et al. Those will still require local CPU/GPU power and big chunks of local RAM, for some time to come. The physical format they're presented in may change, but they'll still be needed for years if not decades.
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June 6, 2011 at 10:15 pm
"Eh, the Cloud will become like electricity. One day we won't even think about it but it will be integral to daily life. "
That's what they said about flying cars and personal helicopters. Where's my flying car?
"Outages and breaches will occasionally happen but we will live with it."
Putting all our eggs in one basket is never a good idea. There will be more outages and more breaches on SaaS than for private client servers because it becomes a more bigger and viable target. Distributed systems unlike centralized systems like cloud are more difficult to bring down all at once.
"Software vendors like Microsoft won't even sell packaged software (even games) because it will all be SaaS. "
Service doesn't scale and never will. Saas will never beat packaged software in revenue because it has huge associated costs both for the provider (she has to pay for bandwidth and other expenses every month) and for the consumer (she has to pay every month compared to just once).
June 7, 2011 at 7:03 am
umailedit (6/6/2011)
"Eh, the Cloud will become like electricity. One day we won't even think about it but it will be integral to daily life. "That's what they said about flying cars and personal helicopters. Where's my flying car?
That's also what they said about automobiles replacing horses for transportation. Where's my horse?
umailedit (6/6/2011)
"Outages and breaches will occasionally happen but we will live with it."Putting all our eggs in one basket is never a good idea. There will be more outages and more breaches on SaaS than for private client servers because it becomes a more bigger and viable target. Distributed systems unlike centralized systems like cloud are more difficult to bring down all at once.
Two things: 1) An internal data center IS putting all your eggs in one basket. And the quality of service infinitely varies from shop to shop. 2) As it turns out, the biggest threats to data security are internal, not external. Not to downplay the threat to the Cloud, but you're implying internal hosting is somehow less vulnerable to an outage which is not the case.
umailedit (6/6/2011)
"Software vendors like Microsoft won't even sell packaged software (even games) because it will all be SaaS. "Service doesn't scale and never will. Saas will never beat packaged software in revenue because it has huge associated costs both for the provider (she has to pay for bandwidth and other expenses every month) and for the consumer (she has to pay every month compared to just once).
OK, now this is just not true. Allow me to enumerate: Google Maps, Google Apps, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Salesforce, Gmail, Hotmail, Skydrive, Box. Shall I continue? And these are only a few examples. Also, private app ownership (actually, it's a lease) is incredibly expensive. Aside from the obvious cost of hardware and software you have: rent/real estate, power, backup power, wiring, security & intrusion, fire suppression, cooling, on-site staffing, backups, and so on. There are LOTS of C-level executives who would love to exchange that kind of overhead for app rental, desktop terminals and WAN capacity.
All of that aside, the forces driving cloud adoption are coming from three directions: 1) IT suppliers who want more control and better revenue streams. 2) Businesses that don't want to build their own "power plant" to run e-mail and accounting apps, 3) Consumers who want access to their data anytime & anywhere.
It's inevitable. It's progress.
James Stover, McDBA
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