5 ms·

Yay for relying on the cloud \o/

by hendi_ 15y ago

jedberg 15y ago
That's like saying "yay for relying on a datacenter"
- hendi_ 15y ago
  Note that I've written "relying", not "hosting", meaning I'm well aware of the fact that using "the cloud" as an additional layer of capacity can be a good thing. But relying on the cloud means that you're giving up control. Power outage in your data center? Buy diesel generators next time! Faulty network card? Put in two redundant ones! AWS down? Wait and pray!
  - jedberg 15y ago
    Go back to the building metaphor. Building datacenters is not our core business, so we outsource it. Much like building a building is not our core business, nor running a telephone system, so we outsource those things too. All business critical, but still outsourced.
    - hendi_ 15y ago
      Of course it's okay to outsource things; and it's also okay to outsource critical stuff. I'm doing that too. But, outsourced or not, critical things should be as redundant as needed, and not relying on a single point of failure. If in a hospital a life-keeping machine depends on electricity, I hope they have diesel generators available even if their outsourced power supply fails.
      - Peaker 15y ago
        I think people thought they were outsourcing the job of not having a single point of failure. Having a critical service supplied by someone does not necessarily mean there's a single point of failure, because that someone might be working to make sure there is no single point of failure.
    - brk 15y ago
      No, building data centers is not your core business, but your core business relies on them so intimately that it makes sense (at least to some people) to have a little more direct control of your datacenter resources. Or, the have a warm-standby of some sort. The best analogy I can make is it's like a telemarketing company. Their core business is not building/owning/maintaining PBXs, it's calling you and trying to sell you crap at diner time. However, because they cannot deliver their core product reliably without a PBX, they tend to own/maintain their phone switches. They don't order 300 simple phone lines from the local telco, they order a couple of trunks, and manage phones and call routing to fulfill their core business needs. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, there are cost factors unaddressed, but it's the best I can come up with right now. I'm personally a fan of cloud services for elasticity, and early stage launching. I'm not a big fan for day to day operation of a site. The model I haven't seen worked up yet, it what does this REALLY cost a site like reedit or 4sq in relation to owning/controlling more of their own infrastructure? It's quite possible the best overall business decision is to take the risk and deal with the unpredictable inevitable outages and just hope they don't last too long.
      - Duff 15y ago
        At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility with significant scale means that you need to have folks working for you who have a clue about operating a datacenter. That's not cheap. IMO, the real question is whether or not you should be running your core business on a genericized "public cloud" like Amazon or if you should be using a traditional server hosting outfit, a managed service provider like Verizon/AT&T or a colo. There's a value calculation that you have to compute to figure out what's right for you. I worked for a company that ran call centers and had a significant commerce site (whose growth exploded beyond expectations) back in the early 2000's. Our offices were a converted school and the datacenter was a classroom with a roof A/C unit. We knew it sucked and suffered through downtime and failures, but the company wasn't big enough to do things the "right" way. So we had to do things the "wrong" way, because the alternative was to go out of business. If that were today, we would almost certainly have had 80% of our systems at Amazon/Rackspace facilities.
  - simonw 15y ago
    Because startups can afford their own data centers?
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    > Power outage in your data center? Buy diesel generators next time! > AWS down? Wait and pray! Wouldn't you be waiting and praying if your datacenter lost power and didn't have diesel generators, too?
muppetman 15y ago
Yes! It's like those dumb people that rent out 5 floors of a 100 story building, instead of building their own SkyScraper. Then, horror of horrors, 2 of the 8 lifts breaks down for 12 hours. Such idiots for paying rent, even though building SkyScrapers isn't their core business.
- jedberg 15y ago
  Thank you. I'm totally stealing this next time someone uses that "cloud is for idiots" line. This is an excellent metaphor.
- hendi_ 15y ago
  Poor analogy; if the lifts break, just use the stairs. Note that I've written "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup". Depending on the cloud means depending on something you cannot influence.
  - muppetman 15y ago
    Ok, it's a bomb scare and the building's shutdown for 12 hours. How I was supposed to get ' "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup" ' from what your originally wrote, I don't know.
    - hendi_ 15y ago
      I'm sorry if you didn't understand "relying" as I meant it. I'm not a native speaker, so my assumption of the meaning of "relying" may have been wrong. I'll try to elaborate: yes, there are of course certain things that you cannot avoid. That's why I meant you should not "rely"/"depend on the cloud without any alternative backup" on the cloud being available. Redundancy, if your service is crucial! If you're a small company, and cannot go to your building for a day, well then I hope you're not that important so no big damage (financial or otherwise) is caused. Just enjoy your free day ;-) But if there's a bomb threat in, for example, a hospital, I surely hope they have some kind of backup plan! Cloud as an alternative mechanism, or maybe even the primary resource for your site -- great, why not! But please don't just throw everything into "the cloud" trusting on the belief that the cloud's operator is impossible to fail.
mootothemax 15y ago
What do you do when a building contractor cuts through your datacentre's link? For example, this happened in London a while back. My point is: things go wrong. Blaming this on the cloud is silly.
- elliottcarlson 15y ago
  It happened to ServInt back in 2004 - the VA Department of Transportation cut the MCI OC-48 and OC-12 fiber strands running to the ServInt datacenter. ServInt handled it amazingly well and learned from their lessons moving forward and if I recall correctly gave a comp'd month to it's customers. They followed up by adding additional backbones in addition to the MCI one and have always been solid since.
G_Morgan 15y ago
It isn't about relying on the cloud. It is more about incompetent cloud providers.
- oceanician 15y ago
  all is fine on that service page now.
- astrodust 15y ago
  Does seem harsh to brand Amazon as incompetent. Things like this probably happen to Google's server farm all the time, but since they're the only customer they can and do reconfigure everything massively to adapt. Amazon can't do that to your application that runs on a handful of systems.

Yay for relying on the cloud \o/

by hendi_ 15y ago

Yay for relying on the cloud \o/

jedberg 15y ago

That's like saying "yay for relying on a datacenter"

hendi_ 15y ago
Note that I've written "relying", not "hosting", meaning I'm well aware of the fact that using "the cloud" as an additional layer of capacity can be a good thing. But relying on the cloud means that you're giving up control. Power outage in your data center? Buy diesel generators next time! Faulty network card? Put in two redundant ones! AWS down? Wait and pray!
- jedberg 15y ago
  Go back to the building metaphor. Building datacenters is not our core business, so we outsource it. Much like building a building is not our core business, nor running a telephone system, so we outsource those things too. All business critical, but still outsourced.
  - hendi_ 15y ago
    Of course it's okay to outsource things; and it's also okay to outsource critical stuff. I'm doing that too. But, outsourced or not, critical things should be as redundant as needed, and not relying on a single point of failure. If in a hospital a life-keeping machine depends on electricity, I hope they have diesel generators available even if their outsourced power supply fails.
    - Peaker 15y ago
      I think people thought they were outsourcing the job of not having a single point of failure. Having a critical service supplied by someone does not necessarily mean there's a single point of failure, because that someone might be working to make sure there is no single point of failure.
  - brk 15y ago
    No, building data centers is not your core business, but your core business relies on them so intimately that it makes sense (at least to some people) to have a little more direct control of your datacenter resources. Or, the have a warm-standby of some sort. The best analogy I can make is it's like a telemarketing company. Their core business is not building/owning/maintaining PBXs, it's calling you and trying to sell you crap at diner time. However, because they cannot deliver their core product reliably without a PBX, they tend to own/maintain their phone switches. They don't order 300 simple phone lines from the local telco, they order a couple of trunks, and manage phones and call routing to fulfill their core business needs. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, there are cost factors unaddressed, but it's the best I can come up with right now. I'm personally a fan of cloud services for elasticity, and early stage launching. I'm not a big fan for day to day operation of a site. The model I haven't seen worked up yet, it what does this REALLY cost a site like reedit or 4sq in relation to owning/controlling more of their own infrastructure? It's quite possible the best overall business decision is to take the risk and deal with the unpredictable inevitable outages and just hope they don't last too long.
    - Duff 15y ago
      At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility with significant scale means that you need to have folks working for you who have a clue about operating a datacenter. That's not cheap. IMO, the real question is whether or not you should be running your core business on a genericized "public cloud" like Amazon or if you should be using a traditional server hosting outfit, a managed service provider like Verizon/AT&T or a colo. There's a value calculation that you have to compute to figure out what's right for you. I worked for a company that ran call centers and had a significant commerce site (whose growth exploded beyond expectations) back in the early 2000's. Our offices were a converted school and the datacenter was a classroom with a roof A/C unit. We knew it sucked and suffered through downtime and failures, but the company wasn't big enough to do things the "right" way. So we had to do things the "wrong" way, because the alternative was to go out of business. If that were today, we would almost certainly have had 80% of our systems at Amazon/Rackspace facilities.
- simonw 15y ago
  Because startups can afford their own data centers?
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  > Power outage in your data center? Buy diesel generators next time! > AWS down? Wait and pray! Wouldn't you be waiting and praying if your datacenter lost power and didn't have diesel generators, too?

muppetman 15y ago

Yes! It's like those dumb people that rent out 5 floors of a 100 story building, instead of building their own SkyScraper. Then, horror of horrors, 2 of the 8 lifts breaks down for 12 hours. Such idiots for paying rent, even though building SkyScrapers isn't their core business.

jedberg 15y ago
Thank you. I'm totally stealing this next time someone uses that "cloud is for idiots" line. This is an excellent metaphor.
hendi_ 15y ago
Poor analogy; if the lifts break, just use the stairs. Note that I've written "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup". Depending on the cloud means depending on something you cannot influence.
- muppetman 15y ago
  Ok, it's a bomb scare and the building's shutdown for 12 hours. How I was supposed to get ' "relying", as in "depending on the cloud without any alternative backup" ' from what your originally wrote, I don't know.
  - hendi_ 15y ago
    I'm sorry if you didn't understand "relying" as I meant it. I'm not a native speaker, so my assumption of the meaning of "relying" may have been wrong. I'll try to elaborate: yes, there are of course certain things that you cannot avoid. That's why I meant you should not "rely"/"depend on the cloud without any alternative backup" on the cloud being available. Redundancy, if your service is crucial! If you're a small company, and cannot go to your building for a day, well then I hope you're not that important so no big damage (financial or otherwise) is caused. Just enjoy your free day ;-) But if there's a bomb threat in, for example, a hospital, I surely hope they have some kind of backup plan! Cloud as an alternative mechanism, or maybe even the primary resource for your site -- great, why not! But please don't just throw everything into "the cloud" trusting on the belief that the cloud's operator is impossible to fail.

mootothemax 15y ago

What do you do when a building contractor cuts through your datacentre's link? For example, this happened in London a while back. My point is: things go wrong. Blaming this on the cloud is silly.

elliottcarlson 15y ago
It happened to ServInt back in 2004 - the VA Department of Transportation cut the MCI OC-48 and OC-12 fiber strands running to the ServInt datacenter. ServInt handled it amazingly well and learned from their lessons moving forward and if I recall correctly gave a comp'd month to it's customers. They followed up by adding additional backbones in addition to the MCI one and have always been solid since.

G_Morgan 15y ago

It isn't about relying on the cloud. It is more about incompetent cloud providers.

oceanician 15y ago
all is fine on that service page now.
astrodust 15y ago
Does seem harsh to brand Amazon as incompetent. Things like this probably happen to Google's server farm all the time, but since they're the only customer they can and do reconfigure everything massively to adapt. Amazon can't do that to your application that runs on a handful of systems.