Cloud computing is FAIL and here’s why Adobe’s spectacular FAIL over the last 48 hours confirmed, rather than revealed, cloud computing to be so unreliable as to be positively dangerous. Cloud computing is shite. It takes over everything you’ve got, then farts in your face and runs away giggling. For those readers blissfully ignorant of what us media production …
As HAL would say, or as Sirius Cybernetics would have it "Share and Enjoy!!", which does sound better than "Go stick your head in a pig!" but amounts to much the same.
This is my problem with several LaTeX offerings available for Android. All the ones I know require you to be online to actually compile the LaTeX source. Not easy (or affordable if available) somewhere outback in Uganda or the like.
"Cloud computing is shite. It takes over everything you’ve got, then farts in your face and runs away giggling."
Couldn't have put it better! I wouldn't trust any of them with my data. I am paranoid when it comes to backups (having been bitten in the past). The irreplaceable stuff is backed up in 6 different places, one of which is not under my roof!
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"Couldn't have put it better! I wouldn't trust any of them with my data. I am paranoid when it comes to backups (having been bitten in the past). The irreplaceable stuff is backed up in 6 different places, one of which is not under my roof!"
I am in total agreement with you both. Multiple backups, off site in two different places, I do not use proprietary software that changes native format, all on encrypted (hardware encrypted) drives.
Should a server fail, I do not need to install OS, proprietary software, import data etc. ...
I do however have a cloud backup of encrypted data. Why? well because the MD of a company read about it somewhere. Do I use it? no. Will I ever use it? no. It gets checked but trying to download 400 gigs of data through a crappy Inertnet <sic> connection on a Saturday night when the pubs are open is not my idea of fun. Just go to mirror server, rename, reallocate I.P. job done. Worse case scenario take encrypted drive to pub with Interwebs, buy a round, share drive and let folks work off that as temporary measure over secure wireless in suitcase setup.
Cloud! Too many issues from: data ownership, sovereignty, bandwidth, security in general, lack of control over backups, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Thankfully the NSA's cloud was totally secure !!! Did nobody tell them about the CIA? (1)
(1) Confidentiality, Availibility, Integrity (1.1)
(1.1) Self contradicting conditions that have to be balanced and are a bit like flying a helicopter.
The Gimp may be a bit kludgy & user hostile (or so I've heard *) but at least it keeps on working no matter what.
Cloud=FAIL indeed.
* I do use it to do basic stuff but I'm nowhere near your typical artsy graphic designer bod.
PS. I must add that ironically the ad linking algorithm in play at el reg is assuring me that the "Microsoft Cloud" will "turn chaos into clockwork". Of course it will.
...I wouldn't touch Adobe Creative Cloud with somebody else's ten-foot pole, for the reasons that Dabbs articulated so beautifully.
I plan on holding onto CS6 until Adobe can pry my cold, dead fingers from around it -- or until my retirement, which isn't actually that far off.
Here's a tall cold one for Mr. Dabbs.
There is little reason for any software to require a permanent connection to an authentication server.
Rather, it should do the login, authenticate, and maintain that authority for a number of days - seven, fourteen, whatever. When it checks in tomorrow, that authority extends another day.
That way you always have a grace period in hand for when these little events happen...
Although I'm a complete cloudaphobe - I run nothing, either applications or data, which is not resident on my machine or on local network drive which I control. Luddite? Perhaps - but I've never been stopped by lack of network access.
"Although I'm a complete cloudaphobe - I run nothing, either applications or data, which is not resident on my machine or on local network drive which I control. Luddite? Perhaps - but I've never been stopped by lack of network access."
Here, it's almost nothing. I try to avoid cloudy nonsense unless I have to.
But this whole saga has reminded me of something I used to point out to people when their internet connections were down and it wasn't something I could fix. "It doesn't matter that much," I'd say, "Your computer still works. Your software still works. The lack of an internet connection means you can't check your emails, but you have other work to do..."
The more people go for this cloudy nonsense, the less true that becomes.
The experts should go back to selling good old fashioned support contracts instead of nobbling everybody's local OSes and software and giving it a nice name.
XP's EOL came about because income from selling XP (nowadays 0) came up against the cost of providing support for it. If MS did offer support contracts for every XP owner (not just a select few enterprises), everybody would be happy. People who want to stay on XP but also want support would pay for it and people who don't want support and don't want to upgrade to something newer either would only have themselves to blame when their precious photos get cryptolockered.
No, EOL of MS XP is due to MS Ego. Nothing else. As has been the case for every MS OS ever. XP EOL isn't anything new. MS has always sold support, at about 4 levels. (Tech Net, MSDN, Select and Bespoke Megacorp/Government contracts). Actually MS just sold a year's Support of XP to a UK Gov. Dept. But on condition they migrate to Win 8.x not Linux.
The point I failed to make was that instead of selling support to ordinary consumers, companies often release almost identical versions every so often (Adobe CSx, Office 2007/10/13) or switch to a subscription model (Creative Cloud or Office 365). The subscription model also locks people out of their files if validation goes wrong or they stop subscribing.
What they should do is throw in support for 2-3 years then charge, which would also have avoided the problems with Adobe's online validation (you always have the right to run the software but not downloading updates for a day if there's a problem which the authentication servers would probably have gone unnoticed) and Microsoft's XP EOL (it's up to the customer to decide if they want to stop being supported and they live with the consequences).
Clouder: Uh, everything's under control. Situation normal.
Customer: What happened?
Clouder: Uh, we had a slight SOAP malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Customer: We're sending a lawyer up.
Clouder: Uh, uh... negative, negative. We had a data leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Customer: Who is this? What's your SLA?
Clouder: Uh...
[Clouder slams down the VoIP phone]
Clouder: Boring conversation anyway. PFY!!!! WE'RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!
Once again, right on the button. It's one if the reasons I stubbornly remained with boring standard IMAP and SMTP (well, over SSL) for email - web interfaces don't work too well offline and webmail has other fun risks for the uninitiated like leaving access credentials behind or even pristine copies of any attachment looked at (Windows users can do Windows-R and type "explorer %temp%" to see what I mean).
As for data storage and services, just say no. Especially if the service physically lives in the US. That the US listens in to everything already is no argument to make that any easier for them :)
What on earth makes you think anything as ambiguous as "The Cloud" lives in the good old USA when it's So Much Cheaper to stick it into a basement in Bangalore?
After all, part of the sales pitch was "Security by hiding it in an Unknown Location".
Did they actually Say it was Physically Located in the US, or did they say the Company has a "US Base"???
The Weasel Wording is all important ...
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While the author has my sympathy, I'm somewhat amazed that he seems surprised by the whole episode.
I mean, isn't it obvious? Having to be permanently connected to a remote system just make some stuff work locally? What could possibly go wrong? Oh yes - I know - network outage, system glitches, power failure, supplier incompetence, security failures, forgetting to pay the bill.....
A centralised server is all very well in an office, but over the internet? It just isn't and can't be reliable enough. Why anyone uses this "Cloud" thing is byond me
Adobe do have features (and patents) in their software that make them the market leaders in some areas, but it's awe-inspring what they have managed to get their customers to agree to over the last few years. It's not that they aren't bastards for doing this, it's just that the sheer arrogance of the Just Works crowd in assuming that they can safely swallow the marketing whole and cede ever more responsibility to the vendor wthout any real protection more than balances this out on the sympathy/pleasure-in-misfortune scale.
It's impressive enough that they have managed to incrementally push DRM that is more and more fail-deadly into products that businesses pay good money for, and which publishing houses grind to a halt without, but their balls in moving to a subscription-only service while also making their core offerings dependent on their own infrastructure (and customers' Internet connections) can only be marvelled at. The next step will be for Adobe to provide products to their customers though leased dumb terminals (perhaps iPads), also including wireless internet connectivity (so that customers can outsource this to them as well), with the only way of extracting files being through this, via Adobe's servers. The logical conclusion of this will be for businesses to avoid having to deal with and hardware, software or Creative Professionals at all and to pay Adobe for (AI-generated) Creative Services directly.
What utter twaddle. You were experiencing a problem with a particular implementation of Software as a Service (SaaS) not Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing obviously works, every time you scan a credit card you are effectively calling a cloud service, maybe not a public cloud, (which is how most people think about Cloud) but still a service operating in a datacentre remote from where you are.
There are plenty of services running on the likes of AWS and Azure that do so very successfully and to say they are a 'FAIL' just because one vendor of one fairly niche service makes a balls up is stupid.
If you were to say that there can be a fundamental problem with SaaS implementations that tie functionality requiring no online component, to the need for an online connection then I'm with you. The logical thing for companies operating like this would be to refresh you licence each day you connect, to ensure that you always have a month’s licence available for those few times there is a problem.
You mean you've never needed to pay in a shop and the terminal cannot/will not connect??
Seriously?
Where do you live? We can then all move to this cloud-topia you speak of.
Me, I live in a [relatively prosperous] suburb of Manchester [UK] and this cloud-payment-scan thing fails nearly every week - in a wide range of shops....
Well, I live in Brazil - Niterói. I don't remember the last time I had problems with the payment system. Be it debit card (do you call it this way?) or credit card.
No system is perfect, and I am sorry to hear about your problems, but I can't say the plastic card system have being failing me.
Twaddle, OK, fair comment. But all the points you raise were tackled in the story.
>>If you were to say that there can be a fundamental problem with SaaS implementations that tie functionality requiring no online component, to the need for an online connection then I'm with you
I see you've never had to write a punchy, provocative headline before.
"every time you scan a credit card you are effectively calling a cloud service,"
I use my card in a number of places that still seem to connect via phone. Never had a problem. Two places I know use ( the same ) web based service. Both advise me to bring cash or a cheque book when I come, because they can't rely on the card machine working.
for people who are proponents of cloud everything - a combination of "cloud" and some other word that eludes me for the moment and hopefully the moderator too.
possible uses:
"are we really gonna buy services from these Clunts?"
"your 5.20 meeting with the Clunts is approaching"
"its down again? i don't believe these Clunts!"
"can you call those Clunts and ask them what the heck is happening?"
"tell those Clunts to get their finger out"
I'd be the last person to defend cloud computing but this seems to be more a case of the unavailability of authentication servers which is still a major fail as they should be replicated. Adobe should have the resources to do this properly yet for one reason or another they have chosen not to, just hope for the sake of those tied to adobe that the reason isn't customer contempt.
Welcome to the 'there's-no-such-thing-as-a-perfect-world' life despite what the cloud purveyors would have us believe. I am of the opinion that no critical system/software should be trusted to an 'all-eggs-in-one-basket' solution, but that's the way the 'clunts' would have us 'users' work. So I'm with Mr. Barnes and his reply above.
...is that while we all understand the limitations and risks of "The Cloud" (using the term in it's popularly understood sense of "you know, Dropbox, Google Docs, that stuff"), Joe Average has been sold the lie of 100% reliability and the nirvana that "The Cloud" is supposed to bring, and has swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then, when something inevitably goes titsup, that vital document/precious photo of new baby/whatever is gone forever.
Marketing. They'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Mine's the one with a copy of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that fell back in time.
So your running a piece of software on your laptop. Points of Failure include...
hard disk, ram, cpu, fan, battery, charger, windows OS, application itself
Add cloud connection and you add NIC, BT (ADSL), ISP, loads of network switches/routers, cloud providers infrastructure, etc.
So "going local" saves you a bit of risk, but what about time to return to service for any of these, All the local stuff is a one man band (yourself) and a visit to a shop (or perhaps an online order!!) to replace components, or nicking your other half's/kid's machine. However, much of the rest have teams of professionals trying to fix it 24x7.
So yes, these cloud connections should be loosely coupled, but in the end you have manage the risk - a coffee spill could knock you out for days, but a cloud service is typically only down for hours...
A cloud service is down until someone somewhere that you have no control over manages to fix it.
A local issue is completely under my control and as a professional will not take me long to fix. Many companies even have a whole dept. called IT - a team of professionals who know how to fix problems.
So a coffee spill would knock me out until I can find something to dry it with but a cloud service will be down for an undetermined number of hours/days/weeks with no end in sight unless you hit refresh on Twitter every 5 minutes. And you pay extra for that privilege.
I'm not saying all cloud is shite but Adobe's idea of using it to authenticate locally installed software is most definitely a big bag of shite.
I have a choice of 3 laptops, 3 PCs and a Server with backups.
I have the network on two switches (I can move stuff to one and ditch some stuff).
I have a spare modem. spare router.
Switches, UPS, Modem & Router on UPS
I have a generator and lots of fuel
I have backups of the backups.
If house burns/falls down I will go to my son's house.
I have no idea what the Cloud Provider has.
Is this something we should be asking the CEO's of cloud computing companies? How big is your family?
Could be if you're planning any "it would be a shame if they suffered any permanent downtime" SLAs..
Personally, I curse the whole "cloud" concept because it's sufficiently vague to allow complete idiots to pretend to other idiots that they have even the vaguest of clue of what they're talking about, creating a cluster of idiots generating a cluster<something> for IT to deliver (it's never the idiot's fault for asking something stupid - in the end, it's always IT that hasn't "delivered). That is really where the current problems started.
I don't like clouds near my IT. Electronics and moisture are never a good mix.
It's the old Big Company Server Subscription model of 1960s.
There is no way at all it's ever "better" for the consumer. You are losing control to a 3rd party. What if they lose interest in the business? What if their disaster planning is rubbish? What if they have a single point of failure?
I'll use the "Cloud" (my rented hosting or 3rd party services) to "publish" my Web sites, share files, do email and browse other people's web sites.
Self hosting isn't practical for an individual or SoHo or SME.
Cloud services are an abomination and backward step in cost, privacy, reliability, access, control etc for applications.
The Policies and procedures of most Cloud providers are opaque or a lie.
While in general I don't like the cloudification of things, I would say that this article is only slightly removed from the simplest form of journalism, which would see cloud and immediately "spot" a trend that will result in everything going into the cloud.
This article is at best one step better, and has spotted cloud not working due to a technical failure, and predicted the demise of everything cloudy.
I'd say stop "predicting" eternal trends, even though it's easy money, and instead say that probably some more stuff will shift to the cloud, but not everything, unless we invent something that completely changes things. That's rather more likely.
For example: logging in to use local Photoshop - probably not a good idea; it should be the same or give a slightly degraded service if some stuff requires the cloud.
But, logging in to access a cloud-rendered Revit 3D view - probably always going to be necessary unless local computing power catches up.
Sheer greed - nothing more nothing less. Despite huge and growing revenues from loyal B2B and wealthy individual customers the Big Cheese's at Adobe couldn't stand the fact that the kids and geeks were using pirate copies. This despite the fact that this pool of users was the only way Adobe shops get their young talent (there is not much in-house training in this industry).
I knew that Adobe was doomed as soon as this fiasco was announced - I just didn't realise the end-game would come so quickly.
The users should donate to and switch to open source asap - the death throws will be long and messy.
Of course, all of the above applies to Windows and MS Office, too
Take the complimentary cloud storage. Use all the cool free online programs...well, their storage, anyway.
Then never use the cloud storage, only local storage, step 1. Why? That means it's updated. Trust automatic updating for the cloud, or let it go perform odd sexual acts with itself. But make sure to store stuff there, as long as you don't pay for it. I'm sure there's a reason.
As far as doing something in a proprietary format that may not even exist as software on your machine, doesn't want to store on your machine but will, and basically requires you to have some other sort of SOFTWARE as backup...you do that for karmic exercise. And adding to your ability to absorb anger, frustration, the awareness of repetitive futility and one's own stupid welcoming of it...and blame it on the cloud. Which is actually other people.
So, you see, the best thing is to use the cloud. That way when anything goes wrong, you can blame it (personified in the driver next to you, for instance).
Artificial Intelligence in reverse, as it were...
Blaming the cloud doesn't get the bills paid.
Ask the Daily Mail how much money they lost due to being unable to publish one of their publications.
How many projects were late because they'd just got back from the field and Adobe would not allow them to use their paid-for software until Adobe's servers came back up?
How many other projects would have been delayed if this had happened at an inopportune moment?
How much compensation are Adobe paying out to cover this loss of business?
How many lawsuits will be started to recover this?
It was obvious that something like this was going to happen from the moment Adobe announced this new business model, and now that the first failure has happened, businesses are going to be scrutinising their SLAs and many will realise that using Adobe is a risk they cannot afford to take.
It's just incredibly bad business to be utterly reliant on a single-source-supplier who can just stop all your work at any time without any notice.
I've always been cynical of cloud computing.
Running our applications and placing our data on someone else's machine just seems to be regressing to the 'mainframe / terminal' model of computing.
It was proved out when our newly clouded corporate email was made unavailable due to MS in their infinite wisdom listing us as a spam provider due to automated regression result emails being sent across our development teams.
Would never have happened when we had a box sitting in a server room, allowing me to connect with Thunderbird.
Grumble moan.
I too am cynical about "cloud" computing and have successfully avoided it so far. As a mac user, I did not upgrade to Mavericks because they removed sync services to force users to sync calendar and contact accounts via their cloud server. I keep separate personal and business accounts and need to sync these accounts. There's no way I'll accept syncing of such personal information via cloud services. So I now remain at 10.8 unless there's a change of policy. Probably for as long as I continue to use Macs then. But why force something to be cloud-based when there's a perfectly acceptable non-cloud solution? And what the hell do you do when you're off-line for any reason?
As a mac user, I did not upgrade to Mavericks because they removed sync services to force users to sync calendar and contact accounts via their cloud server.
It was actually stripped from iTunes. The latest (just released) update has returned that functionality, but you could also have solved the problem by using some hosted groupware as a less NSA intercepted version of iCloud.
And what the hell do you do when you're off-line for any reason?
It gets cached locally..
Anyway, it's now back to local/normal/usable (i.e. without any need for anything hosted). When you try and sync it will also ask you to identify which of the records you want to keep (at one point I had to choose between the record in Contacts, the iPad and the iPhone as they were all different). As for being offline,
Uh, the "'mainframe / terminal' model of computing" was generally known for the fact that 99% of the Work and Data on the Mainframe belonged to the Owner of the Mainframe in question.
The "Rent it out to Other People" model was an exercise in corporate musical chairs that mostly occurred between Mega-Corporations.
Joe Q. Public was almost never rich enough to play in that sandbox.
Besides, even in the bad old days, Mainframe Reliabvility was 99.999%
Downtime, in the rare event that it happened, was seldom more than an hour and generally occurrred on a "once in 5 years" schedule.
That's so much better than the current Server model of once a month for "Lord knows how long, this time. We'll send you an E-Mail when we find out what's wrong".
I wouldn't touch anything cloudy with your bargepole, but this is really more about the stupidity of allowing companies to get away with having local and sometimes very expensive software that assumes you have an always on connection and that their end is always up (oo-er mussus!) and then using that as some kind of DRM sh!te control to "protect" "their" software. That's a nice piece of expensive software that your business depends on you have there. Shame if anything should happen to it or you couldn't access it... When I say allowing them to get away with it, I am looking at you big businesses. You have the clout to lobby that smaller companies and individuals do not.
They just don't understand end user requirements for reliability and that not being able to use the software for even short periods of time can be a huge loss. Sadly, a lot of end users don't realise the risk either, although they might now.
As they charge by the month, they should be offering refunds all round in my view.
I hope the affected users didn't lose out too much.
>> They just don't understand end user requirements for reliability ...
They do but it is expensive to do anything about it. Sometimes it just makes more short-term financial sense to ship a crappy product and let someone else worry about the consequences.
Edit: Not referring to Adobe specifically, just in general. I haven't had to use or pirate their products for years now.
Haven't you heard? It's all about the "Internet of Things". Now, I can hear you cynics out there thinking ( it's a gift ), "But things were already on the internet!", and you'd be "technically" correct ( especially in the case of some specialty fetish sites ). But what we're talking about here are "Things(tm)". You know. With a capital T.
Presumably, clouds would constitute a "Thing(tm)". Web2.0? Perhaps another "Thing(tm)".
Maybe Adobe's problem isn't the draconian DRM, nor it's over-reliance on their obviously incompetent staff, but that they simply do not have enough "Things(tm)".
What network downtime is not embarrassing?
So if it is embarrassing should we avoid it all together or, a bit like nuclear energy, realise we have to dance with new technologies through to them maturing?
If so then science would die (what is the point of intellectualising a deep understanding built on theory, observation of observables, peer reviews, guvmint funding, the models are robust until they are demonstrated to be silly, ...
Kudos to Adobe for having the cojones to make a decent commercial model of it!
And timely too... just a short time after Brad Anderson of Microsoft said that cloud is now as stable, if not more stable, than anything inside the corporate datacentre and we should deploy to it as a primary platform. Funny. Here is a reference to it... http://www.smiile.biz/articles/2014/5/13/cloud-more-stable-than-your-own-datacentre-maybe-but
Good to see that people are getting wise to the giant Achilles heel of "cloud computing."
Does anyone remember WHY PCs became popular? No, the real reason. Because it let people disconnect from the time-shared mainframe model and get work done when they felt like it without asking permission from anyone.
Cloud computing, like enterprise desktop VM, wants to take us BACK to that model.
Uh, actually, most of the people who made the PC popular never HAD the option of connecting to a time shared Mainframe. They saw a use for a computer in their daily lives and suddenly, there was an option that was Affordable for the first time ever.
Even the people who Did have acces to the Mainframe didn't purchase a PC to Replace that access. The bought the PC for their own Personal use, independent of their Employment. That's what the "Personal" part of "Personal Computer" was all about.
What that DID do was drive the cost of a PC down to the point where it was cheaper to buy a PC and install a Terminal Emulator than it was to buy a custom built Mainframe Terminal. AT which point Corporations started buying PCs by the Truckload, driving costs down even Further. All to the benefit of Joe Q. Public...
This is nothing. The day is coming when Adobe and the other Big brothers will decide who publishes and what gets published, and nevermind if the cloud is working or if it is raining or whatever.
I once thought I would die before this day came, (I mean, techno overreach and the exaggeration of salespeople is not a new development), but damn if it isn't happening before the death panels and social value courts are up and working.....
So, we go back to the "terminal" that sits on your desk, and connects to "central". Jeez, we did this back in the 60's. Then came minicomputers, then microcomputers, then the PeeCee, all in an effort to get the compute engine closer to the user where they can blow it up themselves. If the local compute engine blows up, just shift to the one you have next door.
Fast forward to today, and we go back to the "as a service" people and the non -local control of things. Then you get single points of failure (authentication scheme). Not too good.
In the end, I want to own my own home, not rent it forever. I may want to "improve" it as well to suit my needs. Good luck with that on a rental!
So, Cloud == Stupid, which gives stupid a bad image!
In the related Reg articles last year many people myself included pointed out the inherent flaws in this brute-force approach that Adobe was taking with its 'valued customers'. The fact that they didn't build-in a failsafe is unforgivable. Moreover, the fact that their support staff didn't realize or didn't care that logins were needed to post on the forums deserves a firing squad!
Not withstanding the risks of BitTorrent / warez hacking, how difficult would it be to have a solution whereby a series of keystrokes bring up a dialog that allows entering a voucher that can be emailed by Adobe in the event of a meltdown and gives emergency 24 hours access?
This is simply extraordinary, and it shows how the suits are in the charge of everything, while tech geniuses are demoted or outsourced. Whether its the RBS/Ulster meltdown or privacy or financial fiascos like Target, corporations and companies are increasingly treating their tech side with disdain!
The problem here is executives are so removed from it all, many are even of a generation that just doesn't get it! They need to get their bottoms smacked. I'm so glad I no longer work in corporate IT. I live humbly but I live free!
Moreover, the fact that their support staff didn't realize or didn't care that logins were needed to post on the forums deserves a firing squad!
From their perspective that must have been a bonus and a feature worth keeping. No nasty PR problems to handle online on top of a royal screwup - now the impact is at best anecdotal. Can you imagine the mess if they had to moderate the comments of all those irate users?
I'm more and more convinced it's really worth avoiding that company altogether. Their software is already as uncontrollable as it comes - my pet hate is an install routine that then goes off and fetches the actual update as it gives me zero direct data on the size of the update, and little ability to scan for malware. Heck, even the reader does it. On top of that, NONE of their software offers direct access to T&Cs - all they do is point you at a web page with a gazillion different statement that are also multi-lingual but sorted on the English name of the language.
No thanks - I have found alternatives for most.
so how would this fail locally exactly?
on a local pc....your pc might die for many reasons or you might get a virus assuming your policies are shit and you are an idiot. you might forget your password (aaargh twat!!) and not be able to reset it because you dont have anyone that can use utilman / cmd swapover or a linux disk to reset it.
the worst that could happen would be for you to go out and buy another pc. takes, what, an hour? or rebuild your pc...then bung your dvd in and install it. or if you are more technically minded, fix the one you have. so a new pc costs money, but how much are you losing in revenue whilst it is down?
as its been said before, if you leave all your IT to someone else who will employ god knows who to look after your "kit" what do you expect? its like going to PC World to get advice....guess who you are dealing with? someone who tries to sell you windows 8 and norton because the margins are high or because they cant sell you anything else.
they wont ask you what you plan to do with the pc, understand that actually, a samsung 840 pro ssd and 8gb of ram and even a g2120 (£30) cost very little now and will kick the arse out of an i7 and a sata disk - they are just flogging their stuff to you. they dont care. you are one many. if they lose you as a customer, its not important. if they lose your data, so what? you get pissed, have your business down for hours or days and then go somewhere else. at this stage, you have already let your IT guys go.
even the big boys like amazon and MS cant get the failover right - they wouldnt have outages otherwise, for whatever reason i worked for a DR company (adam associates/global continuity) 18 years ago that worked on failover of servers back in NT days....thats 20 years ago...we invented a thing called double take that was revolutionary but didnt really work properly at the time (cant comment on what it s like now though, hopefully much better) i cant believe that the system they knocked up at time doesnt now work flawlessly. it kinda worked back then. but now? why doesn't it just fucking work? server clusters were just becoming fashionable then - its now 20 years on. cloud promises redundant immediate failover systems but it KEEPS going wrong...why is this?
because they are a bunch of clunts. simple. they dont care about you as a customer because you are one of many.
ran out of edit time....a few mistakes in the last post and a few beers here...really though, how can a comany with 10 of thousands of servers all supposed to be redundant and failover not work properly?
"for whatever reason i worked for a DR company (adam associates/global continuity) 18 years ago that worked on failover of servers back in NT days....thats 20 years ago..."
should read
"for whatever reason. i worked for a DR company (adam associates/global continuity) 18 years ago that worked on failover of servers back in NT days....thats 18 years ago..."
All part of them 'controlling' piracy…..
Altium are heading that way, Microsoft with office 360 ( the number of days it does not work cheekily encoded in the name)
Rather Ironic, when pirate software costs them money they cry, but when they fail causing tens of millions in lost productivity all over the world , then its "go read the licensing terms and swivel on this"
'Cloud' is very in these days, but it's largely meaningless.
What has happened is that some central system has gone tits-up.
Since the earliest days of computing, the 'eggs' have been placed in one central basket. We didn't even get round to having actual computers on desks until decades after the computing revolution began. The only novelty about 'cloud systems' is that the owner of the equipment may not be you, and it's easier to alter utilisation patterns to suit load, but Adobe are hardly the first company to have a central service upon which many people rely and which ought to be designed and managed in such a way to avoid This Sort Of Thing (tm).
Leaving aside the business pros and cons of having a subscription model rather than an upgrade model (and that is a business issue, not a technology issue), Adobe's business relied on central systems before subscription and it will afterwards, as will hospitals, banks, the Government, scientific institutes - the whole economy. This episode simply underlines the importance of reliability of a central system. It doesn't invalidate the model in any way, not even for software licensing.
The issue they should concentrate on is how things failed, what to do about it to meet SLAs (if they have such a thing!), and perhaps a better contingency plan for things going tits-up next time.
As we're talking about software licensing and not air traffic control, a very simple contingency plan could have been simply to allow everyone to use the software for free while the system was in 'degraded' mode. It wouldn't be difficult to do.
For better or worse - and I accept that many people find it worse - Adobe have restructured their business so that they are not reliant on spiky cashflow that comes from occasional upgrade patterns of purchasing. They could have stuck to physical installed licences to drive that business model, but in this instance, they've used an online strategy, for obvious reasons. The online strategy is not the thing that is broken. You may not like the business model, but the thing that is broken here is merely the implementation, and they are not exactly the first to suggest a lot of people rely on a central service which ought not to go wrong...
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
How many more Adobe like meltdowns will it take before executives get the message that we don't all want their favourite business model? How many twitter protests before they give us shrink wrapped software back again? Tech executives think there's no going back. But if enough protest things can happen....
There are so many horrible things that can go wrong with the CloudFog model, and this is just one example. Adobe will fix this and screw up again just like last year. Why? Because we don't live in an era of true human+system reliability, never mind hack-proof, constant net access. The only people who do reside in the boardrooms of the tech companies, and they want everything kept on their servers, close to base, under their total control.
How about NOT FOR A DECADE OR TWO? They've basically cornered the market and are basically telling everyone, "Our way or the highway," but since everyone needs Adobe software to be of substance, it's kinda hard to go the highway. There are no real substitutes for most all the Adobe products on the market: only Photoshop can do all thosee exclusive Photoshop plugins, anything comparable to Premiere or After Effects probably treads into professional territory, and you MIGHT be able to pull off an older version of PDF but that means no bells and whistles that clients demand. Plus Adobe's got a bunch of active patents that mean any attempt to seriously compete with them mean lawsuits up the wazoo for the duration.
In essence, Adobe's become the guerillas in control of the only clean well in the village. What options do you have at this point?
DISCLAIMER: I am opposed to using cloud services -- for many reasons -- when suitable local solutions are available. If a local solution is not available, I would prefer to develop one if to do so can be cost-effective.
Has anyone noticed that this "article" is nothing more than a rant? It is virtually bereft of information and only vaguely -- and accidentally -- touches on one or two aspects of the problems with cloud computing. While reliability certainly is a factor, one company's failure to maintain reliable service is not enough reason to abandon the cloud. Furthermore, the author sheds almost no light on this particular incident and talks exclusively about his personal experience.
One hopes for a more sober discussion of the benefits and risks associated with cloud computing.
Indeed it is.
Anyone out there actually surprised?
Really?
I'm certainly not a IT visionary or expert of any sort, just a long time user (35+ yrs.) of computer tech.
But the first time I read about this cloud stuff I immediately realised that anyone heading for it and all the marketing hooplah it promised would eventually set themselves up for a substantial fall.
The usual IT industry suspects want all of us there and in time it will happen, with everyone using a PC with a OS and applications under their thumb, slaves to the highly lucrative OS, apps, etc. as a service model envisioned by their marketing drones.
Why?
Because when it comes to simple and basic common sense people have the stupid tendency to think with their pockets and not their brains. Simple as that.
And by the time they realise they have botched it, it's too damn late.
I strongly believe that this cloud stuff must be stopped and I'm not holding my breath but ...
Cloud computing?
Me?
Not till hell freezes over, twice over.
Cheers.
WTF is wrong with a sodding desktop machine? We have just gone over to a Citrix environment where our arrow keys suddenly get transposed and images disappear from presentation material, accompanied with pauses in the movement of the mouse, crap desktop rendering and general satellite delays in everything that we do? Not being allowed to have anything on our desktops and the inconvenience that causes, reduced storage for stuff we need and the further inconvenience of having to shift stuff around from the UK to Germany to open the sodding thing. If the pipe goes down, then the whole organisation is off-line.
Piss-farting about moving files and opening them on a VM is a pain in the arse. It is a stupid, stupid, stupid idea that mongs at higher levels (CEO) like because it gives them autonomy and "visibility" but us poor sods down the corporate food chain have to put up with.
It's utter bollocks. Stop it now. It might work for huge corporations, but it doesn't work in an SME environment.
couldnt agree more with the last post....i work mainly with SME's...small budget but a day down for an SME is a huge problem. sme for me is 1 to 10 people. when you first encounter them, they havent a clue about IT. they have their business and do email and sage and documents and maybe some other stuff. they dont back up. they have norton installed from the computer they bought at pc world. now we are going to let them buy pc's as a service form some cock whose entire "support" is based on magical pixies who work round the clock from some 3rd world country, who cant do IT let alone speak english? imagine if talk talk were doing your IT...i mean holy shit!!
local IT engineer....
broadband down - no prob, lets use 3g off your phone, or if they have a bigger budget, it will fail over onto the 3g from the router if they've paid for a decent router.
pc fails...well, you can use someone elses if its critical...shove them off their pc, install software if necessary and do mission critical stuff on it whilst i fix yours, or simply build a new machine - few hours.
server fails....worst case we can rebuild it...might take a good few hours though.
if they are on a cloud infrastructure (windows as a service, db as a service, in fact anything as a service) and it fails noone can fix it except the cloud provider - lets say its fasthosts level of support...could be weeks. call them up...hello, my name is johnny (actually rapesh in bangalore) , how can i help?
oh.....fuck!
heres the future guys - its not bright and it sure as shit aint orange.
So you're screaming about cloud because you lost your login service? Wow, like that has NEVER happened in UNIX environments when NIS goes tits up, or Windoze environments when AD barfs,or any environment when your core switches propagates a duff routing table. Seriously, I guess it's because you're one of those fragile creative types, but please do get a sense of perspective.
The Cloud Scam isn't really about the essential flaw in the concept.
The actual Scam is in believeing that Marketing will keep that promise Not to "Snoop" on your data. There's Gold in them thar Bytes and they Will go data mining for it.
Not that they will be using it for silly things like blackmail.
The Big Bucks are in things like Marketing Profiles sold to Other Corporations, the occasional shot at a little bit of Insider Trading and the ability to know that a woman might be Pregnant before she even buys the Test Kit. (We're looking at You, Target.)
The problem here was to do with the database.
Guess what? Databases have been falling over since about a minute after the first one was created.
Sure, this particular database wouldn't have existed in the old days, but in general if you don't know much about IT it's better to have experts keep everything running than try to do it yourself.
The problem was not that SaaS is inherently dodgy, it's that Adobe seem to have employed idiots rather than experts.
Everyone employs idiots - we all do idiotic things at inappropriate times. The problem with the Cloud model is the "force multiplying" effect it has on idiotic actions. One cock up, a million unwanted pregnancies. If I spill coffee on my laptop its me who is suffering a single local consequence - if Adobe mis-fiddle with their authentication database it is thousands around the world suddenly, instantly, being unproductive. Worse yet, Adobe are charging you, the lucky customer, on monthly basis to be put in 'that' position. Now I know Universal and Busch Gardens charge people to be placed in seeming peril and a good slug of adrenalin it is too. However, there is enough added adrenalin in running a business without the top-up of outsourcing to idiots beyond your immediate control. Me, I trust Adobe, or indeed any other Cloud based service, about as far as I can piss. When the T&Cs say we get a £1 a second for unavailability and get to watch the public execution of the hapless minion responsible I may reconsider.
Brilliant sir, a breath of sanity on Monday morning.
That first paragraph brought tears of joy to my eyes. It's just what I've been trying to get across to Users (who ask) for a while, but have been invariabley outnumbered by Techies in pompous smirk mode.
Now there are two of us.
Thank you Ali Star
ALF
This post has been deleted by its author
Why? Because that is where big companies and small are putting their money. If you want a slice of that money, you had better be ready to play the game. Executives think it is nifty because they fall for marketing BS. Executives are the ones that let you keep your job.
You have two options.
Become an integrator of said systems and make them work for your current employer.
Become an engineer for a company that provides cloud computing services.
Well, technically you have 3, do neither and find yourself in the bread line in 5 years because your skills have become irrelevant.
Personally, I am with most of the posters here, and don't put anything I value in the cloud. Come to think if it, I don't put a thing out there. I'd rather have my data on my systems. That being said, my last two jobs have been with one small and one large [software company in Redmond] SaaS providers.
Blaming 'the cloud' for your unrealistic expectations, presumably supported by Adobe, doesn't mean it's 'shite'. The cloud has perks. You just have to know when they're worth having.
On that note, you all should try ShareMyFile.net: share files under 300MB for free, and without sign-up. THAT is the cloud working FOR you.
I use Lr 3.6 but intend to upgrade to 5 - didn't bother with 4. I had an Adobe drone trying to force me onto Lr 5 and Ps CC in the cloud on Sunday morning, as the 'offer might be withdrawn at any time' - despite the web site saying it's available till May 31st - and 'I should sign up now to be sure' - followed by '.. if you give me your order confirmation ID I'll check it's gone through' (and cash in on my commission).
So -
Adobe spectacularly failed.
Yammer went down last week
Office365 seems to go down quite regularly.
I lost data when Humyo got bought out by Trend Micro a few years back (put me off it there and then).
So I would use a public cloud ... WHY? Exactly?
Don't tell Adobe but I'm using CS version 0 - the student version at that, which is 10+ years old. I use it for a few things a month, have used about 10% of Illustrator's capabilities, about 2% of Photoshop. It's falling apart on my Win 8 pc but I still have it on my offline XP pc. Adobe made $500 on me that long ago. Now they want me to pay every month, be online always and store stuff up there. Bad deal for Adobe, good deal for me.
Cloud everything is great for those working in IT where all bandwidth is paid for by the company or you're making enough to pay for mega bandwidth at home from your phone or cable company. I live north of a really big city on the west coast of a nation a little south of Canada but above Mexico. I have yet to watch my favorite YouTube cat videos (that's what I'm going to call them) without constant stop/start/stall/kill and restart, at home, at work or wardriving around my neighborhood.
I understand the cloud people's mantra of 'log in anywhere, on any device" and "we update for you" but I think the forcing of cloud computing on all sucks.
I know cloud very well. I know IT very well.
The title of the article "Cloud computing is FAIL and here’s why " vs the reality: you couldn't log into Adobe CC for 48 hours, leaves your wide open to (well deserved) criticism from people that know what they're talking about.
Defining "Cloud" can be challenging. Extracting the hype/opinions/theories out of the conversation is a good place to start.
I think of Cloud (generically) as an assembly line approach to IT. It's still HW, OS & SW solutioned to provide/deliver a set of services. And as you'd expect, there are pro's and con's/potential risks & rewards.
Regarding Adobe CC - even if login was down for 48 hours, Adobe would still have achieve 93% availability for that month - and 99.45% for the year (assuming no other outages).
p.s. if you don't like Adobe's CC, don't use it.
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