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I keep seeing thse kinds of articles where the author has drank the Cloud kool-aid themselves, forgotten how to function without it, and insists that it's impos

I keep seeing thse kinds of articles where the author has drank the Cloud kool-aid themselves, forgotten how to function without it, and insists that it's impossible to function without it. This guy even drags manufacturing into the mix, and obviously has no idea about manufacturing in the United States. Manufacturers in the USA don't make cheap coffee cups. We don't make underwear. We don't make car fenders. We make warheads. We make gyroscopes. We make electro-mechanical assemblies that China or Malaysia or Mexico would screw up. We specialize in quality over quantity, and we specialize in cutting edge tolerances and specifications. We make export controlled things for enterprise contracts and the government. Things that require certifications to produce, and govermnent regulatory compliance, and tight tolerances. Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. We don't make 100,000 of anything either. We make 100 gyroscopes for General Dynamics, or 5 jet engines for General Electric. We make US military grade munitions and weapons for the government. The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. All that great automation that helps AirBNB function with no infrastructure is meaningless when you have to protect your IP from nation state actors. To probably >50% of American manufacturing the Cloud is useless. It's a consolidated attack vector that WILL be compromised in the future and lead to liability. Sure you can put a NIST 800-171 or DFARS compliant business in the Cloud, but it costs extra and it's not worth the risk. You hear about misconfigured buckets leaking data almost daily. Nobody doing govermnet manufacturing work wants to deal with that headache. Infact, I've been in this industry for 10 years and I have NEVER seen a DFARS compliant supplier with outsourced IT infrastructure. I've visited hundreds of companies over the years. What you're describing doesn't interest American manufacturers one bit.

munin 8y ago
> The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. This is probably going to change. People like you said the same thing about health data, and student data. The savings were so tantalizing that the regulators and stakeholders figured out how to make it work. What do you think GovCloud is for? C2S and "Secret cloud"? Our university had a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team. When "Google Apps" came out, people wanted us to switch to that from our old mail server stuff. Go figure, why would you keep using pine and squirrelmail when you could use gmail? "It can't hold student data" the IT team said, "it isn't certified for FERPA or ITAR." Okay, true. Fast forward two years, now Google's "Apps for Education" can deal with both. The switch was sudden and brutal and the university no longer has a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team or an Exchange deployment of any kind.
- blub 8y ago
  Fast forward two years and after Google promised they would not spy on the students like they do on the general population to get the contracts they did exactly that. Lobbyist and fools can get past most logical objections and cloudify anything.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  And at some point, AWS or Azure might be considered more secure than servers configured and administered by an organization that doesn't have that as its core competency.
  - illumin8 8y ago
    This. Who beat every single private organization with Spectre/Meltdown mitigation? Amazon Web Services. There is a pervasive myth that servers run by private organizations are more secure than those run by the public cloud providers, and the opposite is actually true. Does your organization receive embargoed information from Intel to mitigate side-channel 0-days before they are publicly announced?
ProAm 8y ago
> Manufacturers in the USA don't make cheap coffee cups. We don't make underwear. We don't make car fenders. We make warheads. We make gyroscopes. We make electro-mechanical assemblies that China or Malaysia or Mexico would screw up. We specialize in quality over quantity, and we specialize in cutting edge tolerances and specifications. We make export controlled things for enterprise contracts and the government. Things that require certifications to produce, and govermnent regulatory compliance, and tight tolerances. Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. This a blanket statement and is wrong. Most cheap manufacturing is done over seas but the US still has a large manufacturing sector that makes all sorts of crap.
- Frondo 8y ago
  We sure do, and our stuff is generally a little more expensive than the Chinese-made import but a lot higher quality. My go-to example is brooms and mops. Libman makes their brooms and mops in the US, and I'll never buy another brand. They break like any sort of cleaning product does, but a lot less often than the imported ones (IMO). Sterilite boxes are also made in the US -- cost a bit more than imported, but again, much higher quality. It's a shame there isn't a "made in the US, and slightly more expensive but a lot higher quality" option for everything I buy, cause I'd do that in a heartbeat. I hate buying shit that breaks; waste of my time to even have to think about that stuff.
throwanem 8y ago
We don't need a lot of people to do all those things.
sandworm101 8y ago
>> Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. There are still people making nails in the US. Fertilizer. Food gets exported. Then there is all the stuff to too expensive to ship. Lumber, aluminum sheeting, cement ... lots of non-precision stuff is still made locally. Not every US factory makes munitions. And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for speed. The fashion industry has to react quickly, quicker than overseas shipping can manage. I just ordered a small electronics assembly from a Canadian manufacturer not because they are the most skilled or precise but because they can chat with me on the phone and ship a small-run (5) faster than any Asian manufacturer. (It's a device for measuring laser energy at specific wavelengths but I have some specific needs re how the data is collected/displayed. It only took a 10-minute call to explain my issues and get a deal together.)
- coldtea 8y ago
  >And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for speed. The fashion industry has to react quickly, quicker than overseas shipping can manage. Almost everything in the fashion industry is made in Asia. And few consumer goods (if anything) are "too expensive to ship". >I just ordered a small electronics assembly from a Canadian manufacturer not because they are the most skilled or precise but because they can chat with me on the phone and ship a small-run (5) faster than any Asian manufacturer Yes, but for anything at scale, they wont be the most competitive option.
  - greedo 8y ago
    Clothing industry != fashion industry.
mr_overalls 8y ago
> ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD Do you find this a bit strange, given that the Pentagon is making a massive push toward (presumably private) could infrastructure? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cloud-idUSKBN1KG2PA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cloud-idUSKB...
tmaly 8y ago
If anything, it will be a private cloud setup on an isolated company owned data center.
icedchai 8y ago
They probably are allowed to use the cloud, it just requires a lot of red tape and paperwork: filling out forms, waiting, and filling out more forms. Pretty sure AWS GovCloud exists for a reason, and that reason isn't because it has no customers.
foozed 8y ago
The article is not talking about IT at Raytheon but "[...] anonymous Windows administrators and point-and-click DBAs and “senior application developers” who munge JSON in C#".
throwaway98121 8y ago
May not be allowed to use cloud today but that will likely change in the near future. FWIW, I can imagine your post in my head as an argument in favor of horses over automobiles. What you’ve seen in 10 years was reality during that time. That speake nothing little to the future.
nunez 8y ago
Good points, but there are other American-dominant industries aside from defense manufacturing, and they are definitely taking a keen interest in the cloud. Also, defense is moving to the cloud too, albeit more slowly than AirBnB, say.

munin 8y ago

> The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. This is probably going to change. People like you said the same thing about health data, and student data. The savings were so tantalizing that the regulators and stakeholders figured out how to make it work. What do you think GovCloud is for? C2S and "Secret cloud"? Our university had a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team. When "Google Apps" came out, people wanted us to switch to that from our old mail server stuff. Go figure, why would you keep using pine and squirrelmail when you could use gmail? "It can't hold student data" the IT team said, "it isn't certified for FERPA or ITAR." Okay, true. Fast forward two years, now Google's "Apps for Education" can deal with both. The switch was sudden and brutal and the university no longer has a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team or an Exchange deployment of any kind.

blub 8y ago
Fast forward two years and after Google promised they would not spy on the students like they do on the general population to get the contracts they did exactly that. Lobbyist and fools can get past most logical objections and cloudify anything.
jimbokun 8y ago
And at some point, AWS or Azure might be considered more secure than servers configured and administered by an organization that doesn't have that as its core competency.
- illumin8 8y ago
  This. Who beat every single private organization with Spectre/Meltdown mitigation? Amazon Web Services. There is a pervasive myth that servers run by private organizations are more secure than those run by the public cloud providers, and the opposite is actually true. Does your organization receive embargoed information from Intel to mitigate side-channel 0-days before they are publicly announced?

ProAm 8y ago

> Manufacturers in the USA don't make cheap coffee cups. We don't make underwear. We don't make car fenders. We make warheads. We make gyroscopes. We make electro-mechanical assemblies that China or Malaysia or Mexico would screw up. We specialize in quality over quantity, and we specialize in cutting edge tolerances and specifications. We make export controlled things for enterprise contracts and the government. Things that require certifications to produce, and govermnent regulatory compliance, and tight tolerances. Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. This a blanket statement and is wrong. Most cheap manufacturing is done over seas but the US still has a large manufacturing sector that makes all sorts of crap.

Frondo 8y ago
We sure do, and our stuff is generally a little more expensive than the Chinese-made import but a lot higher quality. My go-to example is brooms and mops. Libman makes their brooms and mops in the US, and I'll never buy another brand. They break like any sort of cleaning product does, but a lot less often than the imported ones (IMO). Sterilite boxes are also made in the US -- cost a bit more than imported, but again, much higher quality. It's a shame there isn't a "made in the US, and slightly more expensive but a lot higher quality" option for everything I buy, cause I'd do that in a heartbeat. I hate buying shit that breaks; waste of my time to even have to think about that stuff.

throwanem 8y ago

We don't need a lot of people to do all those things.

sandworm101 8y ago

>> Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. There are still people making nails in the US. Fertilizer. Food gets exported. Then there is all the stuff to too expensive to ship. Lumber, aluminum sheeting, cement ... lots of non-precision stuff is still made locally. Not every US factory makes munitions. And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for speed. The fashion industry has to react quickly, quicker than overseas shipping can manage. I just ordered a small electronics assembly from a Canadian manufacturer not because they are the most skilled or precise but because they can chat with me on the phone and ship a small-run (5) faster than any Asian manufacturer. (It's a device for measuring laser energy at specific wavelengths but I have some specific needs re how the data is collected/displayed. It only took a 10-minute call to explain my issues and get a deal together.)

coldtea 8y ago
>And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for speed. The fashion industry has to react quickly, quicker than overseas shipping can manage. Almost everything in the fashion industry is made in Asia. And few consumer goods (if anything) are "too expensive to ship". >I just ordered a small electronics assembly from a Canadian manufacturer not because they are the most skilled or precise but because they can chat with me on the phone and ship a small-run (5) faster than any Asian manufacturer Yes, but for anything at scale, they wont be the most competitive option.
- greedo 8y ago
  Clothing industry != fashion industry.

mr_overalls 8y ago

> ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD Do you find this a bit strange, given that the Pentagon is making a massive push toward (presumably private) could infrastructure? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cloud-idUSKBN1KG2PA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cloud-idUSKB...

tmaly 8y ago

If anything, it will be a private cloud setup on an isolated company owned data center.

icedchai 8y ago

They probably are allowed to use the cloud, it just requires a lot of red tape and paperwork: filling out forms, waiting, and filling out more forms. Pretty sure AWS GovCloud exists for a reason, and that reason isn't because it has no customers.

foozed 8y ago

The article is not talking about IT at Raytheon but "[...] anonymous Windows administrators and point-and-click DBAs and “senior application developers” who munge JSON in C#".

throwaway98121 8y ago

May not be allowed to use cloud today but that will likely change in the near future. FWIW, I can imagine your post in my head as an argument in favor of horses over automobiles. What you’ve seen in 10 years was reality during that time. That speake nothing little to the future.

nunez 8y ago

Good points, but there are other American-dominant industries aside from defense manufacturing, and they are definitely taking a keen interest in the cloud. Also, defense is moving to the cloud too, albeit more slowly than AirBnB, say.