Video Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video) 409
Robin: I am Robin Miller for Slashdot. And who do we have with us today?
Curtis: Hi, I am Curtis Peterson. I am with RingCentral, and I am the Vice President of Operations.
Robin: You know, I heard you guys tossing around the term ‘server huggers’.
Curtis: Yeah.
Robin: What does that mean?
Curtis: Well, you know, they are a dying breed of IT guys that in all legitimate phases actually built a good career around putting in infrastructure for companies and businesses where they ran their local apps. They put their files storage in there, they put their email application on premise, they usually took over a broom closet or a leftover refrigerator storage room and converted it into a pretty nice little server room. But the world’s changed—we’ve gone cloud, we’ve gone network, we’ve gone application, quick integration. The server huggers are the guys that won’t give up their little rooms and keep hugging their little servers.
Robin: Aha. So now you are saying that network is the computer—I heard that once.
Curtis: Yeah, I heard that once too. I have to admit that I’ve been around long enough to know both ends of that cycle.
Robin: Okay now, here’s the thing that gets me—when we say the cloud, aren’t we really saying some space on somebody else’s hard drive and a blade server or else a virtual server somewhere?
Curtis: Yeah, of course. At the end of the day, there are still CPU or processors, there are still spindles, there is still memory, there is still power and network and things moving around. But it is not on premise anymore. It is collocated in the larger data center for the efficiencies of scale are more green, the efficiencies of scale are easier to run and operate. For customers it is more about reliability and uptime.
Robin: What you are saying is that my friend Joe with his little hosting service—what about him? Where is he going to go?
Curtis: He goes out and he brings collocation space and he puts services in there and he provides them either over the top in the internet or with direct connectivity or secure links out to the businesses that use Joe’s services that he hopes.
Robin: Yeah. Actually he is. He controls the servers themselves. But he is in a big facility, you know, he has got a couple of cages in Northern Virginia. So how about him? What does he do when he takes your stuff? Is he in the cloud? What is he?
Curtis: Yeah, sure. He is in the cloud, but there is more than just having servers in a collocation center to make up a cloud. The cloud is a design concept to an application. It means that that hosted service is accessible anywhere in the world, not just in that one network for that one customer. It is usually persistent across multiple devices, so I can get my hand-held smart phone or my iPad or I can work on my computer I can do it from Starbucks, I can do it from my office. And I am seeing the same persistence of data out there. So if your friend Joe designs applications that way, and is hosting it in a data center with really good internet and backroom connectivity, then sure, he is typically meeting the definition of a cloud occupation.
Robin: And has for many years, for that matter.
Curtis: I am sure a lot of years ago we were calling this an ASP, so in the late ‘90s and early 2000s there were application service providers. The big difference between that time period and kind of where we are now is the application service providers typically deployed single tenant based systems in the infrastructure inside the cloud. So each customer had their own set of servers, their own set of networks, their own applications instance. What we have done in the last few years is realize that the scalability of that model and the operational expense of that model is really not different enough from just putting that service inside the company to really make a compelling scale cloud argument. Cloud also includes this concept of multi-tenancy which then brings in that ASP model up to the modern age.
Robin: Let’s talk about small businesses. They are either just getting on the internet, they are still some out there who aren’t.
Curtis: These are the same guys waiting for the yellow pages book to show up every year, right? You know, I worked with a small business not that long ago that actually had a security breach inside their building. They used internet only sparingly. It was some casual email, mostly with the younger staff. A small business, family owned. It was in the printing business. An attacker got inside their system, encoded all their files and demanded fifty grand to unlock the files. This is not a new story. So I had a conversation with the gentleman that owned the company. I said, “Don’t pay off the guy but what you need to do right now is you need to put your storage in the cloud.” That way you could have your on-premise files, and you have this backup out in the cloud where you are not going to get exploited for those images back, twenty years of his work to be precise.
Robin: Yeah. No doubt you found somebody who could undo, who can decrypt anyway.
Curtis: Yeah, well, we won’t get into that side of it, but sure. Small businesses, you know it is already a struggle. I have worked with small and medium businesses my entire career and people have a hard time realizing these guys work 18, 19, business days of the month which is typically 20, 21 days. And that just covers their expenses. That last day is the only time that family makes money. And if you are spending all that money on this super smart guy that you need to protect your data, or to run a 24x7 IT shop, it is really a strain on your finances. But not only that, you put a lot of load usually on a single individual. Presumably, he wants to take a vacation one day. He needs to leave your shop for a couple of weeks. And that’s where cloud scale can really make a big difference.
Robin: That’s really a good point. Now here is the question: Slashdot readers tend to be that IT guy. Whether for a small business or in the bowels of Citibank, we’ve got them. All that is a lot of programmers. Maybe more programmers. How does this move to the cloud affect the IT guy? How should he manage his career in light of it?
Curtis: Oh I mean this is actually, the server hugger IT guy should be celebrating this move. This is a huge opportunity to improve their skill set and to grow in their career and become even more valuable. Look, a company that puts a couple of applications, on a couple of different servers in a closet and still maintains a backup on paper or has an accountant on the side, when they put all their eggs into the cloud basket, you know, they really need a network that performs all the time—class of service clearly set up, network performance that is well understood, great internet connections, sometimes even backup internet connections on there.
And then the next part of their service is they can become what they originally were. You see, 20 or 25 years ago, when the IT explosion hit when the ability to buy a clone IBM server even really a regular IBM server for under ten grand and put it in a business. The IT team became the Holy Grail in the company. They could automate something quicker than anyone else. You didn’t have to go to an outside firm to re-engineer an entire process line. Somebody could code it up real quick. There is a new era coming where you can start taking applications from one piece of the cloud, from another piece of the cloud, start gluing them together and putting together really awesome business processes. So that IT career is going through a little transformation cycle but I think actually the better days are ahead.
Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
Leasing is always more expensive than buying (Score:5, Interesting)
It's cheap in the short run, especially if you can't afford the hardware. That's why people used to lease time on IBM mainframes in computer centres. Now people lease time on x86s in computer centres, not realizing that buying enough for your base load is affordable, as well as cheaper in the long run.
The leasing (cloud) people just love people who don't know about costs.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
I run two diesel generators, they're backups for when the local utility stuffs up their responsibility and fails to provide power, it's exactly the same reason I'm not going to outsource my server farm to someone else.
Re:Excersise for the reader: (Score:4, Interesting)
I just replace "in the cloud" with "let somebody else control your valuable data".
"Cloud" is great for some things, not so good for others. Just like every other technology ever invented.
Anybody who doesn't understand this is either a complete retard or a filthy, lying marketeer. Which one are you, mr. Peterson?
Well played... (Score:4, Interesting)
Posting someone's stupid slashvertisement for "moving into the cloud" THREE stories away from "Adobe's Cloud Services Down...again" (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/15/1429204/adobe-creative-cloud-services-offline-again)
Nicely done!
Re:Wrong concern (Score:2, Interesting)
The real issue, is picking the right cloud service for your organization.
Some you will have great deal of control, others they do everything for you. You can also setup the contract that they are responsible for such data and if it goes away they need to compensate for the loss.
There is an impression that each of us will make a better system admin then anyone else. However in real life if we run our own servers we run into issues where you don't have the budget for the remote offsite location. You needed to hold off on those new drives to replace the failing ones.
Sure cloud systems are open to vulnerabilities and human errors. However being it is suppose to be the cloud company key job to keep it running, they should have the budget to keep in business, also with a proper contract you can squarely blame them for any mistake.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:4, Interesting)
(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)
Re:Wrong concern (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, this.
Cloud services are garbage. If the physical server is dead and is shared by some other customer, you are straight up screwed. This is why OpenStack is a joke.
Now, if one can afford 8 physical servers, then you should. If you are trying to save money (nobody saves money by moving to the cloud unless they were overpaying for leased hardware to begin with, which is also true a lot of the time.)
Like we give up enough by not owning the data center, but that's a legitimate price to pay because the data center is staffed 24/7, even when it's on fire or during an earthquake. But when I can't get someone to physically swap a hard drive, forget it.
You should still own the hardware if you are considering cloud style management. For example, if I normally need 100 servers, but only need 25% of them for half the day, then spinning up all the servers that aren't in use is an obvious waste of power. Rather it would make sense to spin up a new server every time the 95% mark is hit. Much like how child processes in the web server work. Now as long as I have servers to spin up I'm fine. But a new project doesn't have that luxury, but going straight to OpenStack or Amazon Web Services means to over pay for idle hardware.
Nevermind the interconnect costs of shuffling data between the Cloud servers which would cost nothing if you own the hardware.
Then there is the privacy/security problem. PATRIOT act basically tells all businesses outside the US to stay the f*** away. Using foreign cloud servers means you are subjected to both the laws of your country and the laws of the foreign country.
So no, Cloud servers are not worth dealing with unless you own the physical hardware and are only going cloud for management of your own hardware. It's a foolish endeavor to use cloud servers that you don't own the hardware to. I'll give a case point: iWeb in Montreal had these "smartservers" which are VM's that have the entire machine, so nobody shares it. However for the first few months of leasing one, the the virtual network card would keep failing and the physical machine would need a reboot to restore it. Cloud Servers are terrible at scale, because if it overloads the physical machine, it kills all the VM's.
So I may be saying a much of stuff that nobody cares about, but I'm saying that Cloud Servers are just a stupid idea in practice. The point of it is to scale performance hot spots rather than replace the entire server infrastructure with fragile less efficient nodes.
Here's an analogy for those of you who TL;DNR:
Say I have a 10 gallon barrel of water. When the server is overloaded, it drains quickly.
If I switch to a cloud server system, I'm now instead buying 16oz bottles of water and storing it in that same 10 gallon barrel of water. So there is both less physical water in the barrel, and it takes more work to open the bottles. If by chance those bottles are all used up, you now have to get more bottles out of your neighbors barrel that they aren't using. Sounds like it's a good deal, but the neighbor isn't benefiting and the only one making money is the person bottling the water.
Cloud servers = bottles of water. Physical servers = Barrels of water.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen none that promise legal indemnity for any data stored on their cloud.
Until they offer that, I'll hug my server, rather than get fined or sent to prison (yeah, nobody goes to prison for something like that, but it's theoretically possible) .
Re:Wrong concern (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked around the PHB doing something like this by telling him we'd written our own cloud software and were using it because it was more secure than what is currently available.
He doesn't talk to cloud guys, because we've already got a cloud provider (AFAHKT).
Yes, things like this [dilbert.com] really work in real life.
Re: Wrong concern (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and speak to a privacy expert because your "reading" of privacy law is incorrect.
Ah yes, asserting I'm wrong, without any specifics. Why not? Because you just want me to be wrong, but have no information that would indicate otherwise. Some privacy laws specify "no customer data" may be shared without explicit permission. That doesn't say "can't be shared in a usable manner" or anything like that. SOX and some of the other laws (like HIPAA and others) do specify it must not be usable, so you can upload encrypted files the cloud provider can't read. But those aren't the only secrecy laws out there.
Go on, prove me wrong. Oh wait, you (and your experts) can't, because I'm right.
If their controls are so effective, why didn't you link to one of the providers with an indemnity clause accepting legal responsibility for any breaches? Is that because nobody actually stands by their "certification" with a legal promise? Seems the "experts" at all those companies agree with me, not you. Is that the real reason you are so angry?
Re: Wrong concern (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course you have to either provide backup yourself or routinely hard-verify the cloud provider's backup scheme. And you'd better have a backup-backup offsite recovery contract for when the cloud provider announces it can't really recover (e.g. Hurricane Sandy). And a super-backup plan in case the cloud provider disappears with no forwarding address, or has all its servers confiscated by DHS.
So.... tell me what the big advantages of "cloud" are again?
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