Nicely put. I will point out however, that I did say it's someone else's computer, but that's not the only thing it is. That was the point of my diatribe. Anyone can create their own elastic cloud in-house, so you don't need to rely on someone else to realize the benefits. I would argue that, although akin to timesharing, there's an important distinction from "classic" timesharing by virtue of availability of elastic resources. Finally, I should have added that I would most certainly not recommend this for VCF, as it's not suitable to the task at hand. On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 1:21 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On 11/30/18 7:09 AM, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I'm not going to argue with anyone's points here, as they are all valid. I've also been in IT for 35+ years and have built and maintained days centers. The only thing I will contradict is the idea that cloud is just "someone else's computer." Yes, they belong to someone else.
Not to be argumentative, but I will emphasize that this was the point I was making. Those computers do, in fact, belong to someone else. They are sitting in a building(s) that belong to someone else. And someone else controls them, and someone else is responsible for their maintenance, in every respect.
However, cloud (by definition) is not timesharing, it is not co-location.
I agree that it's not co-location, but I'd ask you to tell me how, exactly, it isn't timesharing. Elastic, capacity-on-demand functionality is typically implemented using virtual machines, with behind-the-scenes migration of VMs from host to host, in response to hardware failures, reorganization, or just plain moment-to-moment operating conditions. We all know that...and I know YOU know that; I'm not "talking down" to you here. My point is, your VMs are sharing a machine, or a set of machines, and mass storage, in the larger sense. It's not likely that any (smaller) customer of such a service provider will have any visibility into exactly where their VM lives and what else is running on that processor core at any given time.
This is, by definition, timesharing. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your point of view as to why.
Now, if you are a big enough customer to have a "nobody else on this hardware" deal with the provider, that's great...and moves it a big step closer to being co-location. Admittedly though, not completely so, but I couldn't not point it out. ;)
One of the benefits of cloud computing is to offer nearly instant elastic, on demand resources for variable workloads, such as software development, seasonal or other intermittent tasks. Traditionally, we would overbuild our data center to handle these things and as a result, 80% of our resources would be at 10% to 20% utilization for the majority of the year, wasting energy, space and the time of our staff to maintain them. To be sure, we keep core, business critical systems on prem (with HA and DR in co-lo) but that's ~5% of our infrastructure. After extensive risk analysis, we are able to put everything else in cloud, with the proper security and availability controls that meet our needs (we are a pharmaceutical company and most maintain GxP environments.) As a result, we only pay for the resources we actually utilize, can allocate and de-allocate resources on demand. As well, our lean IT staff can concentrate on higher value work.
The benefits are huge, only a moron would dispute that. It's incredible, the things a modern VM-based hosting network can do, and the benefits to their customers are very real and absolutely huge.
But those benefits do not come without a cost: Direct control over just about everything is lost. Some suitly types may say that this is a good thing, but I personally would never accept that. That is one of the reasons I left the business of "big I.T." Decisions are now being made exclusively for suitly reasons, not technical reasons. We all remember the beginnings of this, when suits in charge of I.T. started valuing contracts over OS source code licenses. They don't want ways to fix things quickly, they want someone to scream at when it breaks. I'm a technical person; I don't work that way.
You said above that your core business-critical systems are kept in-house, and for you, that's about 5% of your infrastructure. In my case, my core business-critical systems are about 80% of my infrastructure. In other words, my mileage did, in fact, vary.
For that other 20%, I'm envisioning of all the idiots I've interviewed and rejected in the past, who went on to work for Rackspace...I'll keep that 20% in-house, thanks. ;)
Further, benefits or not, it's still "someone else's computer".
To be sure, cloud is not a magic bullet. Getting true value from it requires due diligence in knowing your compute environment, your business and security needs, and creating/maintaining proper governance and controls. It may not be cheaper, but done properly can be more efficient and result in a much more agile infrastructure. Again, YMMV.
Agreed on all points. But VCF is neither Netflix, AirBNB, Atlassian, nor a pharmaceutical company. The moment VCF's internal operations begin to depend on an agile infrastructure with capacity-on-demand etc, I'm sure things will be looked at a bit differently.
Tread lightly :-)
You've met me, right? ;)
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA