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Like climate change, IT paradigms cycle from one extreme to the other on a regular basis.
I sit in a room adjacent to a data center. A mandate was passed down that we have to have the data center completely migrated to "the cloud" by the end of September.
This is a government operation, so cost is no concern, and neither will it be when we migrate back to an on-site data center.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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#realJSOP wrote: This is a government operation, so cost is no concern, and neither will it be when we migrate back to an on-site data center.
Just set everything up so you only need to turn the power back on when everything's scheduled to come back on-site. Pocket the money saved. There's your way into retirement.
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They are going to physically remove the racks and the raised floor, and build a cubicle far m in its place. If they do change their minds, the racks will be re-purchased and placed in a different location.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Yeah, I had no doubt about that. Would be amazing in fact if they realized they wanted to go back and still have the older system in place. Well, that's how you keep some people employed...
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Wait for the nightmare when connectivity to the servers migrated to the cloud is way slower than when it was in the local datacenter. As a fellow gov't schmuck, we deal with this all the time with email that has been migrated from local Exchange servers to regionalized email servers. Email is slow, sporadic, and often times just plain unavailable, especially on the classified network where it's horrific. Good luck!
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I'm not sure that connectivity would necessarily degrade any further than they already have.
Yesterday, we were at the end of a 4-hour data pull, and somebody (in the windows admin office) applied a new group policy to the server, and it turned on the firewall with default settings usually applied to desktops, which terminated our connection to the remote service. It took an hour to determine exactly what happened, and another two hours to fix it, and there is no guarantee it won't happen again. By the time we were ready to restart the data pull, the DBA had left for the day. This kind of sh*t happens *every day* here.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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PeejayAdams wrote: the cost of cloud servers is only likely to rise as people become tethered to a particular service provider.
Fortunately the market provides a lot of competition. Digital Ocean hasn't changed their $5/mo 1GB 1CPU offering in years.
Another trend that I'm watching with interest is distributed computing / P2P computing -- technically not "the cloud" but it offers a potential challenge to the (ironically) monolithic providers like Amazon and Azure -- what would it be like if individuals sold storage / compute / page serving capabilities where the web app was distributed across hundreds, if not thousands, of devices, from a simply rPI to a super high performance machine? Redundancy is part of the lure of distributed computing, and of course security is one of the major issues to solve.
Regardless, I see distributed computing as a potential future where these huge, power hungry, space consuming, eye sore data centers become replaced by, well, every connected device that sits their mostly idle.
As an example, while I'm at work, I have a small web server, a development machine, an Intel NUC, a Byte3 Mini PC, and an rPI just sitting around doing pretty much doing nothing, all on, all connected. Heck, they do pretty much nothing while I'm at home too!
Latest Article - Azure Function - Compute Pi Stress Test
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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PeejayAdams wrote: ...from the cloud back to the server room. Aren't those the same thing? I mean, "cloud servers" have to physically exist somewhere, correct? Before "the cloud" was a term, where did the servers reside that we stored our data on?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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It's "Server Room" when you can see the servers. It's "Cloud" when you can't.
(I can just see the day when some PHB at Amazon asks "All of our clients' data is in the Cloud, isn't it? So what do we need all these servers for?")
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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David Crow wrote: Aren't those the same thing?
No! When we refer to cloud, we are talking about saving data in the ones above in sky. That is why cloud hosting is very popular in England while not so much in middle East.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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Yes, sorry, I meant "on-site server room."
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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PeejayAdams wrote: physical, on-site servers offer more bangs for less buck year by year; We've found that using Azure is much less expensive than having our own servers.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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...doing what?
If you're on some MS partner program and already get a bunch of Azure credits, then sure.
But if you actually have to pay for a large amount of bandwidth, storage, and instances of machines with a sh*tload of CPU and memory each...those meters start to spin pretty fast.
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The savings comes in not having to hire someone or many people to maintain and patch your own servers.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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I suppose depending on the scale of it, it makes sense.
I work at home but have more VMs that need to be patched than exist at my (small) employer's actual office. For that--even though I'm just one guy here at home--I use WSUS.
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We found that paying for a cloud-server is 5-time more expensive than managing and replacing our server EVERY YEAR... And we do replace servers only every 3-5 years...
I hope that the 'fashion' attitude toward technical issues will fade away, and cloud will get its rightful place among other things (like mainframe, no-sql and others)...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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I'm not claiming to be more enlightened, but I recently migrated my stuff back to my in-house servers, mainly because I can precisely control it.
Look, I'm a control freak I admit it freely. but I hate losing total control of my systems, hence back to my own hardware.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Same here...
I discovered this:
Open-source virtualization management platform Proxmox VE
Recently.
Installed it on 4 nodes, on a Dell C6100 (96gb 32 Cores) blade server I had, and now I pretty much have my own on premise EC2 style platform.
Because it runs on Debian, it will run on pretty much any hardware you throw it at, and it supports Windows, Linux, Solaris and odd balls such as QNX and WindRiver RTOS systems.
It has a built in LXC Compatible containter system that can roll out Turnkey based Linux appliances, and there's several articles floating around the net that shows you how to add Docker support to it.
It prefers CPU's with virtualization extensions, as many virtualization platforms do, but will still run on systems that don't have VT extensions (Unlike Hyper-V) and even though full VM's on not VT hardware is not optimal, using the containers is not effected in anyway.
The system has web hooks for all it's operations, and I've hooked my own .NET core (Or am in the process of doing so) based DNS support into the system, so when I spin up a container I instantly get it registered in the system wide DHCP/DNS and proxy systems, which will then give me the ability to just say "Spinup a turnkey.... some app" and instantly have it available in the network with a registered IP and working routing.
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PeejayAdams wrote: What are the thoughts of the more enlightened?
They've already seen that cycle. Everybody else is just repeating history.
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To power a server alone will cost you over £500 a year (depends where you are obviously). To host a website, you need that server running 24/7. To host in the cloud, you only pay when the website is running. Architect correct.
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As a military historian\analyst as well as a senior software engineer, I can categorically state that the concept of the Cloud is probably one of the more stupid things the technological field has come up with.
Information is the supply-line of organizations. With multiple organizations increasingly storing their data in more centralized locations, cloud services are simply very large attack surfaces where multiple lines can be destroyed, corrupted, or disrupted.
Though an organization that stores all of its data in its own servers can also be just as easily attacked, its attack surface is much smaller and can in fact be made far more difficult to attack as a result of a good security team.
Cloud Services are merely another form of aggregators whose sole goal is to make money off its many clients.
Keep your attack surface as small as possible and you are not only more difficult to find, unless you are a large organization, but also less likely to be attacked in general...
Just my 2-cents...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Not a chance.
Migration will go from Amazon to Azure to IBM Cloud.
IBM is closing our facility down. They will NOT host our backup server. Demanded we moved to their cloud. Since they screwed us, we moved to the Amazon Cloud where we have more experience.
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I do tend to agree with some of your thoughts but perhaps more toward moving to a Hosted off-site facility. The issues that I have had are that the internet does go down and your team has lost everything, especially if your running web enabled applications. In some locations power distribution is just as bad. The other issue is support where it is sometimes less expensive to have the hosted facility take care of all the hardware / setup support (VMware as an example) instead of hiring an internal person to do the maintenance.
In the long run you can probably buy the hardware for less then the monthly recurring charges and you may be able to get a better deal on OS / Server licenses. From my experience the "Cloud" services are very expensive and blocks a lot of access or even differentiates DB software (Azure). I asked about the support issues if my internet connection goes down how am I suppose to develop and update not just code but DB tables and SPROCS. Doesn't happen easily or cheaply.
Yep, the "Cloud" I believe just clouds up a lot of issues but it's the thing to do.
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Real estate is more expensive and desirable than hardware.
(Speaking from the basement "computer room").
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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So, I have an HTC phone.
It just popped up an alert, "HTC Sense - consider a new theme"
With a merry christmas theme. In elephanting March.
And the christmas picture was all northern hemisphere snowy - nice picture nevertheless. But here in NZ, December is all summery, and swimming, and BBQs, and sunblock, and beers at the beach.
And it's March.
GrrrrrAhh!
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