Comment on I hate Clouds - a personal perspective on why I think Clouds suck
ctkatz@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
there are too many points of failure for me to ever be comfortable using the cloud as a primary storage option.
i’ve always maintained this opinion when “the cloud” started being touted as being the future. and yet more corporations (including mine) are reliant on it. i mean sure, i can log in on my home computer and have some access to stuff as though i were physically at the office but that convenience ain’t worth the headache if the main storage site crashes.
there are too many points of failure for me to ever be comfortable using the cloud as a primary storage option.
If everything that you run is local as in the same physical location and there is no requirement for external or internet access then sure. Not everyone has that luxury. Otherwise, There are the same number of points of failure in a non-cloud configuration. You just feel more comfortable with those because you have direct hands on control.
. You just feel more comfortable with those because you have direct hands on control.
You write “actually following best practice instead of faking it and lying” funny.
You write “actually following best practice instead of faking it and lying” funny.
Are you implying that the various cloud vendors lie about the way they configure their environments or admins don’t have emotional biases or something else entirely?
Having done everything from building my own servers 30 years ago to managing hundreds of servers in data centers to now managing hundreds of instances and other services in AWS, I’ll gladly stick with AWS. The hardware management alone makes it well worth the overhead.
25 or so years ago I had to troubleshoot a hardware issue in a SCSI-based server with 6 hard drives in it. A drive appeared to be failing so I replaced it and immediately another drive failed, then another, and so on. After almost a full day of troubleshooting later and we realized the power supply was actually the culprit and could no longer provide sufficient power to the full set of hard drives.
20 years ago while managing 700+ servers in a datacenter we had to manage a recall of about 400 of them thanks to the Capacitor plague that caused a handful of our servers to literally burst into flames.
Hardware failures like the above and dozens of others were mitigated in most cases thanks to redundancies in the software we wrote. But dealing with hardware failures and the resulting software recovery was a real PITA.
With AWS I may occasionally have a Linux instance lock up due to a hardware failure but it’s usually fairly easy to reboot the instance and have it migrate to new hardware. It’s also trivial to migrate a server to run on more (or less) number of CPU’s, RAM, etc. with only a couple of minutes of downtime.
The more advanced services AWS offers like object storage, queues, databases, etc. are even more resilient. We occasionally get notified that a replica for one of these services had failed or was determined to be on hardware that was failing, and it was automatically replaced with a new replica.
I’d much rather work this way than the way I did 20+ years ago.
Why not outsourcing just the hardware then? Dedicated servers and Kubernetes slapped on them. Hardware failure mitigated for the most part, and the full effort goes into making the cluster as resilient as possible, for 1/5 of the cost of AWS. If machines burn, it’s not your problem (you can have them spread over multiple sites, DCs, rooms, racks) anymore.
We did that (with Rackspace) for years before migrating to AWS. AWS is still far better from a service & flexibility perspective.
My employers website has certain times of the year where we see a huge increase in web traffic. When we had a hosted solution it took weeks of preparation to provision additional web servers to handle that load. We had to submit formal requests for additional servers, document how to wire them into our network & required firewall rules, etc. Then we had to wait an arbitrary number of days for them to do the work. And then we had to repeat that whole process when we no longer needed the additional capacity.
With AWS we just define an auto scaling group and additional web servers are spun up automatically when demand is high, and frees them up again when no longer needed. Even if we didn’t use auto scaling we could easily automate this sort of thing via terraform or other tools and spin up additional instances in minutes instead of days.
Tja@programming.dev 4 months ago
If the storage “crashes” it doesn’t matter if it’s in the cloud or on-prem.
With the cloud you get two substantial advantages:
Of course all this costs big bucks, but technically it’s superior, easier and less risky.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
AWS engineers’ first responsibility is to shareholders
Mike’s responsibility is to your same boss.
They are not the same.
Bonus: you can see Mike’s certs are real.
Tja@programming.dev 4 months ago
It’s not about responsibility (and only the c suite reports to the shareholders, not Mike), it’s about capability, visibility, tooling and availability.
nexusband@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s easily mitigated just following established standards. Redundancy is cheaper than anything else in the aftermath and documentation can be done easy with automation.
You don’t, you rent rack space in a location far enough away but close enough to get the data in a few hours.
It’s neither superior, easier or less risky, it’s just a shift in responsibility. And in most cases, it’s so expensive that a second or third on site engineer is payed for.
Tja@programming.dev 4 months ago
And what is simpler and faster, renting rack space in another continent (and buying, shipping, racking and initializing) or editing your terraform file?
nexusband@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why on another continent? Except maybe VDI, some direct calls to some LLM or some insane scales, there’s nothing really that needs those round trip times.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Not OP, but they are comparable efforts, especially since it’s a relatively infrequent activity. You can rent dedicated boxes with off-the-sheld hardware almost instantly, if you don’t want to deal with the hardware procurement, and often you can do that via APIs as well. And of course both options are much, much, much cheaper than the Cloud solution.
For sure speed in general is something Cloud provide. I would say it’s a very bad metric though in this context.