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Recommending someone to build in the cloud is an easy and safe recommendation to make. Therefore, more people will go that route when asked what you should do.

Recommending someone to build in the cloud is an easy and safe recommendation to make. Therefore, more people will go that route when asked what you should do. Pretend for a second you plucked someone from a royal family that never prepared their own food, and they asked you how to make food. Are you going to recommend they purchase land, start a farm, grown their own vegetables, and raise their own cattle? Hell no. You tell them to go to the grocery store (cloud) and if they are desperate, they can purchase some pre-made food at restaurants (SaaS providers). When you don't know anything about a person's exact needs or abilities, making the safest recommendation is easiest, and therefore it proliferates. I hate the cloud but I know how to do what I want on my own without it. You don't know that about other people.

cookiecaper 10y ago
I don't think the cloud is the grocery store. It doesn't give you a pre-packaged solution that you can just rip open and immediately access. Rather, the cloud is like leasing the land from an owner. You still have to till, plant, maintain, and harvest, but you have to pay an annual rent to do so. There are a few things that the landowner is responsible to provide, but most of the day-to-day maintenance responsibility is on the lessee. People generally recognize that while renting is sometimes necessary, it's much nicer to be an owner. We really need to stop this belief that the cloud is a magic thing that can fix your problems. It splits out the responsibility for actual, real-life hardware maintenance to a hosting company, but other than that, the responsibilities, including the responsibility to take backups, set up security, and design a fault-tolerant application, remain in the cloud user's court. Cloud is just a way to rent a virtual server; you still have to make the server work correctly.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  I think most cloud providers go beyond that. For example, creating/restoring snapshots with a UI, monitoring/automation tools, large scale DB services, etc. I rent dedicated servers from a large-scale provider. They're really good at hardware and networking, but that's all they do (well, that and some OpenStack S3 equivalent). I have to do my own Icinga monitoring, Ansible automation, etc. For the type of product I run, it's fairly simple. It's maybe not as cheap as owning the hardware, but I think it's a good compromise. Not to mention that when everyone is using that same tool from Amazon, and at some point it gets big and clunky and its development stalls because people rely on it never changing.. then other options out there eventually leap frog. (I strongly dislike the google-cloud UI, I waste so much time when I have to use it for one of my clients that has stuff there)
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Snapshots can be created and restored with bare metal if you install the right software. Only basic metrics are monitored by AWS by default (have to pay more for more detailed monitoring) and alarms have to be specifically configured, as I recall. Note that "bare metal" doesn't necessarily mean non-virtualized; the end user can be running VMWare or Xen on owned hardware and get "cloud-style" flexibility and goodies like automatic monitoring. DB services is a different class of problem than bare metal v. cloud application servers, and cloud DB services can be used whether you run your application on bare metal or cloud instances (but, for the record, the same type of things are mostly applicable here, in that the user still has to do their own security and configuration).

cookiecaper 10y ago

I don't think the cloud is the grocery store. It doesn't give you a pre-packaged solution that you can just rip open and immediately access. Rather, the cloud is like leasing the land from an owner. You still have to till, plant, maintain, and harvest, but you have to pay an annual rent to do so. There are a few things that the landowner is responsible to provide, but most of the day-to-day maintenance responsibility is on the lessee. People generally recognize that while renting is sometimes necessary, it's much nicer to be an owner. We really need to stop this belief that the cloud is a magic thing that can fix your problems. It splits out the responsibility for actual, real-life hardware maintenance to a hosting company, but other than that, the responsibilities, including the responsibility to take backups, set up security, and design a fault-tolerant application, remain in the cloud user's court. Cloud is just a way to rent a virtual server; you still have to make the server work correctly.

mgbmtl 10y ago
I think most cloud providers go beyond that. For example, creating/restoring snapshots with a UI, monitoring/automation tools, large scale DB services, etc. I rent dedicated servers from a large-scale provider. They're really good at hardware and networking, but that's all they do (well, that and some OpenStack S3 equivalent). I have to do my own Icinga monitoring, Ansible automation, etc. For the type of product I run, it's fairly simple. It's maybe not as cheap as owning the hardware, but I think it's a good compromise. Not to mention that when everyone is using that same tool from Amazon, and at some point it gets big and clunky and its development stalls because people rely on it never changing.. then other options out there eventually leap frog. (I strongly dislike the google-cloud UI, I waste so much time when I have to use it for one of my clients that has stuff there)
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Snapshots can be created and restored with bare metal if you install the right software. Only basic metrics are monitored by AWS by default (have to pay more for more detailed monitoring) and alarms have to be specifically configured, as I recall. Note that "bare metal" doesn't necessarily mean non-virtualized; the end user can be running VMWare or Xen on owned hardware and get "cloud-style" flexibility and goodies like automatic monitoring. DB services is a different class of problem than bare metal v. cloud application servers, and cloud DB services can be used whether you run your application on bare metal or cloud instances (but, for the record, the same type of things are mostly applicable here, in that the user still has to do their own security and configuration).