News from the Clouds
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is not so unusual a theme here. Let's give it a thread. Because we like multi-threading and concurrency, which giveth us more chances of 
, 
, and other annoyances.https://www.wsj.com/articles/cios-still-waiting-for-cloud-investments-to-pay-off-11664449203
Some are even seeing costs go up.
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@BernieTheBernie Well, duh, I could have told them that. After all, the key is right there in the beginning of the article, where it talks about the vaunted "can scale up and down according to your needs" aspect.
Well, sure, it can scale up and down, if your needs scale up and down. More realistically, though, nobody's needs scale up and down, but, most often, up and up, especially when the cloud user's data is stored in the cloud. If you keep it in-house, you pay costs for your datacentre, but if you put it in the cloud, you pay costs for the datacentre plus for CPU and so on, plus you pay for the cloud provider's profits...
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@BernieTheBernie Well, duh, I could have told them that. After all, the key is right there in the beginning of the article, where it talks about the vaunted "can scale up and down according to your needs" aspect.
Well, sure, it can scale up and down, if your needs scale up and down. More realistically, though, nobody's needs scale up and down, but, most often, up and up, especially when the cloud user's data is stored in the cloud. If you keep it in-house, you pay costs for your datacentre, but if you put it in the cloud, you pay costs for the datacentre plus for CPU and so on, plus you pay for the cloud provider's profits...
Well, TBH, having own datacenter can be quite costly too (salaries and/or real estate), so most small-to-medium companies use hosting services anyway and pay all this stuff anyway.
Of course, "good old" hosting providers are cheaper than "cloud service" providers.
Unless you're in Finland, where you can half your expenses by moving servers to AWS (true story).And then there is a whole space of tiny projects which could, when carefully implemented, fit into Free Tier (again, true story).
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@Kamil-Podlesak May I remind you of the sorry episode in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/death-by-delete ?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@Kamil-Podlesak May I remind you of the sorry episode in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/death-by-delete ?
TIFP
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Status: Fully reentrant.
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@Steve_The_Cynic In theory, I don't see what that has to do with the provider.
In practice, cloud providers make backups extremely easy. So, maybe that would have saved them. They would have to have had the backups turned on though...
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@Kamil-Podlesak May I remind you of the sorry episode in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/death-by-delete ?
You may, but I don't see the relevance. That story is about very bad architecture and a lack of backups. The only role of hosting provider is a convenient scapegoat for a lawsuit, which is arguably a plus (in the corporate world).
Had the MegaPetCo their own server in their own datacenter, the story would be the same. Probably. It's quite likely that instead of losing all data to a badly written DML statement, they would loose all data to fire started by careless smokers using the
janitor closetdatacenter as a smoke-break room.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
More realistically, though, nobody's needs scale up and down, but, most often, up and up, especially when the cloud user's data is stored in the cloud.
Data costs tend to go up over time, as deleting data is tricky (unless you make it extremely easy by using a time- or fire- or flood-based deletion policy). Compute costs really can be scaled up and down, provided you design for it or at least switch the unwanted services off.
The advantage of cloud infrastructure is that you can get infrastructure geographically distributed around the world for short-term rent. Building your own infra for all that is extremely capital-intensive and needs a lot of people too. But going global certainly ain't free. It never was.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in News from the Clouds:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@Kamil-Podlesak May I remind you of the sorry episode in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/death-by-delete ?
You may, but I don't see the relevance. That story is about very bad architecture and a lack of backups. The only role of hosting provider is a convenient scapegoat for a lawsuit, which is arguably a plus (in the corporate world).
A key element of that story, though, and its primary relevance here, was the other consequence of the bad management - the huge bills they paid for hosting their entire business on a hosting plan suitable for a small blog.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in News from the Clouds:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in News from the Clouds:
@Kamil-Podlesak May I remind you of the sorry episode in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/death-by-delete ?
You may, but I don't see the relevance. That story is about very bad architecture and a lack of backups. The only role of hosting provider is a convenient scapegoat for a lawsuit, which is arguably a plus (in the corporate world).
A key element of that story, though, and its primary relevance here, was the other consequence of the bad management - the huge bills they paid for hosting their entire business on a hosting plan suitable for a small blog.
Yeah, but even that happens in ordinary, non-cloud hosting.
Of course, "cloud" provides the capability waste money by mismanagement on a scale previously reserved for military and governments in general. But isn't that the main point of capitalism?
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@BernieTheBernie our customer has been trying to get us to go to the cloud for years. Their parent even set up a couple of data centers a while back. I think one was managed by HP and the other I don't remember. They were super cluster fucks and got shut down after a couple of years.
We've done some studies and have found that moving to AWS probably wouldn't save them money and would have significant disadvantages for them (some advantages, too, but still). Might still happen, but we've basically been running our own mini-cloud on their premises.
