[PLUG-TALK] There is no cloud
Tomas Kuchta
tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com
Wed Feb 10 03:20:56 UTC 2021
On Tue, Feb 9, 2021, 15:12 Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Feb 2021, TomasK wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2021-02-09 at 10:16 -0800, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> >> I saw nice quote in a discussion thread this morning:
> >>
> >> There is no cloud, just someone else's computer.
> >>
> >> At one level, it's a fairly obvious statement. At a more unexamined
> >> level, it has the benefit of raising questions like
> >>
> >> * What happens if my 'cloud' provider goes bankrupt?
> >> * Who gets ownership of my data at that provider?
> >> * Who guarantees that my data is destroyed (or protected) correctly?
> >> * What legal protections do I have if that new owner leaks my data?
> >>
> >> After all, it just lives on someone else's computer, aka a normal
> >> business asset.
> >>
> >> I'm sure different companies make different guarantees, but in the
> >> end
> >> closing or bankrupting a business is up to its owner, not you.
> >>
> >
> > This in my view is double accounting problem - you care to look only at
> > one side (cost) of the ledger. Try adding the opportunity costs to the
> > other side and see how it balances out.
> >
> > There is huge opportunity costs/looses stemming from stuck enterprise
> > IT departments, putting serious break on innovation and flexibility.
> >
> > That itself is massive cost to doing business, putting aside the
> > advantages of pay for what you use today only model. Even in the best
> > of enterprises, I have seen - people are stuck with 6-10 years old not
> > properly patched linux OS, paying for crazy expensive beyond EOL
> > support, holding back SW and computing HW upgrades for years ......
> > storage in the wrong places or lack of it, project storage/CPUs hoarded
> > unused for half the project, networking issues, mountains of not
> > transferable/obsolete skills mandated by IT, etc.
> >
> > This kind of drag does not exist in today's cloud. So, many companies
> > do not have a choice - either die by your own IT incumbents or move to
> > the cloud to avoid it. Kind of like Sen. R. Shelby holding Nasa back
> > for decades, if you follow space.
>
> While I like to think I manage local assets to a level that your
> either-or ("icky, outdated on-prem" vs. "shiny new cloud") isn't
> applicable, I take your meaning.
>
> I use cloud services regularly, and recognize their value. This e-mail
> went out via the mail server I run on a Digital Ocean VM.
>
> At the end of the day, however, it is not I but the owner of the cloud
> service who holds all the decisions about whether that service will be
> available tomorrow. It's someone else's computer, not mine. So I
> backup my VM to assets I actually own and manage.
>
> I should of course have framed my original post as part of a risk
> assessment, not as a local vs. cloud binary option.
> .
I agree.
Don't get me wrong - I am not sure that cloud is ideal solution for every
type of computing, on price, performance and features.
Making good choice is tradeoff, so I was highlighting other side of the
coin.
That being said, the state of enterprise IT, as I have seen over the
decades mainly in large and humongous enterprises, is pretty sad, archaic
and definitely not focused on innovation and creating value.
People, including self, are bashing Amazon, Google for many different
reasons.
On technical, IT side, I disagree with that negative. Currently, I see
particularly Amazon and Google (+ some other cloud companies linode,
backblaze, .... Not sure about M$) as progressive, innovative, open and
customer value focused companies. That is why cloud is eating everyone IT's
lunch and rightly so. That however was not the point I tried to make -
instead, trying to shine light on the dark side and costs of the in house
IT.
-T
>
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