'$6 in every $10' spent on cloud infrastructure is with AWS, Microsoft, or Google Spending on cloud infrastructure services shot up by more than a third again as workload migration and cloud native applications development sped up, according to the latest research from Canalys. After AWS filed its latest set of quarterly figures last night, analysts at the channel focused consultancy confirmed that some $ …
They won by projecting fear that businesses are not capable of setting up their own infrastructure.
The has become as self fulfilling prophecy.
The initial cost of setup could be high and then you have added maintenance cost. But it is like with subscriptions. First two years you think you are saving, but then you are locked in and then it turns out you paid many times over of what would it cost to run things on your own (that is on rented or co-located dedicated servers).
The rejection of idea was always down to the fact the people in charge won't be able to blame someone else if something goes wrong.
If you get a service from AWS and it goes down, you can blame AWS. If you run your own, you need to take responsibility and often people prefer to throw money away than work it out themselves (especially if they are VC backed, investors get anxious when they hear "self-hosting"). Provided that the failure is not a data centre fault, you could very likely get your own services up much quicker than anxiously refreshing status pages of cloud providers and not knowing when they'll fix.
Yeah, that's basically nonsense. Companies are rubbish at running their own infrastructure - moving from a big UK bank to a start up really proved the point to me. Just running a microservice in a docker container in the bank came with a 80% chance of failure per deployment - in AWS it just works fine.
From my experience with UK banking, they contract out development and they get cheapest possible bottom of the barrel developers. If you were curious why some of these systems look like stuck in the 90s, that's why. There is no wonder why would they have failing services, most probably they don't even know what microservice is.
Such a nanny hosting is really a godsend for them, but this is not a representative example.
I hate to break it to you, but after 30 years of consulting, I can tell you that the security and services at virtually ANY company I worked for were barely adequate. I have never worked for what I truly consider a "secure" company; they all focused on a balance of "good enough", budget costs, and time required - as any business does.
When things are driven by risk analysis, they don't end up bulletproof, because the smallest of chances isn't worth the expected cost to fix.
Of course managers are now finally learning there is no such thing as a "small" intrusion and that they ALL cost major dollars to repair, so those cost-benefit sheets have been getting a rework at the reputable ccompanies. And they've mostly decided their own staff screwed the pooch so far, so they outsource it.
If I can get into a company's shoddy intranet then I can still rob their cloud service keys and do pretty much anything I like. So it's true that companies have crap security but I don't see cloud solving that problem. In a way it just outsources competence and gives a false sense of security.
A better way to raise the bar is to start making company directors personally liable for data breaches up to and including criminal charges. Make their companies take security audits the same way they take financial ones. It might encourage them to act preemptively for once.
I disagree. The issue i have observed, is that there is a talent shortage. Companies want entry level people to have decade of experience, and as a result they either have hyper desperate people who needed a job or underqualified liars, or in most cases the position is unfilled. So most of the infrastructure will be unmaintained. This is why hacking is such a problem, because there is so much unmaintained infrastructure that the vulns outweigh the patches. No one wants to train, but no one wants to pay to retain people. People knock pensions, but Grandpa's generation did not offered a pension out of social justice and compassion, they offered it because they needed to retain talent.
The nightmarish scenario that is our reality, is that companies don't have the talent for the infrastructure, and will have to pay these premium prices for cloud services, until the cloud services become expensive.
All this cloudy datacenters are great till you have some muppet company that does warehouse controol systems that is still living in the 1970s and does not support patching, needs a minimum of 1ms latency to everything and wants to use Windows NT workstation as that Windows XP is too new, what that virtualisation, thats for those devOps smoke and mirros types, as for Linux well...
Did I mention about not supporting patching? Apparently we need to have test and Dev warehouse set up for that.
That is '$6 in every $10' spent on cloud infrastructure is with AWS, Microsoft, or Google and that does not include money people spend running their own infrastructure. This just means AWS, Microsoft, or Google have 61% of the market. Which to me means the not big three have quite a nice slice of the market.
There’s an application generational thing here that El Reg and media generally seem to be wilfully ignorant of… it would be nice to hear a bit more nuanced narrative.
Where businesses have legacy applications running 24x7 on VMs cloudy IaaS does not make financial sense - it’s an old saying but this truly is just using someone else’s hardware. Cloud is not a panacea, your applications need to be optimised to take advantage of their offerings.
I would say that, as in nature, it is a fact of life that all systems need a certain amount of downtime.
Running your own infrastructure means that you can schedule downtime. If there is an important event such as a visit by the Queen, you make sure that there is a minimal chance of downtime at the most critical times. No updates, no testing, no development work, etc. Note the use of the word minimal there. Of course you can't factor in a squirrel chewing through a mains cable which is an event that is out of your control.
Using cloud infrastructure means that you've not only got the squirrel. A hell of a lot more now depends entirely on events out of your control. Earlier this week, as with any week, accountants had prominent events far more regular than the Queen visiting that would have required that conversation between Accounts and IT: "no dodgy work whilst raising invoices, end of month, payroll runs, VAT reconciliations, etc.", all of which would have got the Queen treatment to a greater or lesser extent. But this happened...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/27/xero_outage_accountancy_saas/
It's not as if you can ring Xero and say "look I'm doing my end of financial year-end today, would you mind frightfully not doing any work that can impinge on this please?"
You might say "Cloud? Downtime?" No such thing. Viewed externally, that's how it is perceived, but whatever they say, cloud systems need the same kind of maintenance we all need, it's just that it's done on a rolling basis, and we are not generally aware it happens... until it fails.
The point is that "maintenance" is a risky business because often there are dependancies involved: in the cloud, moving from one network to another to perform maintenance on the one going off-line means ensuring that the data is up to date on the network going on-line, and that all peering is pointing to the new one ahead of the switch. That transition is a work of art because it has to cope with a very large combination of what-if's, each of which aborts the transition if it fails. The idea of "routine" has moved up several notches, but is still vulnerable. With your own infrastructure you, as being responsible for any cock-ups, just don't put yourself in a position of risk. Ok there are those that do take risks, but you are engaging competent IT people right?
With the cloud, the competency of the people you employ to run your IT infrastructure is replaced by those that know how to manage cloud resources with the best outcomes. Those resources are a lot more complex than those pertinent to in-house IT, and just as expensive. Don't believe that the cloud means you can totally get rid of IT-savvy people. Cloud choices are often couched in administrative or cost terms, but there is an important technical element to them too, which needs addressing by a suitably knowledgeable person. How likely is that person to understand how a particularly cloud system works? It's not like the basics of how TCP/IP works, or how data on a Hard Drive is stored. It is at a much more abstract level than anything most of us have been in IT for years would be used to.
The business that I do work for is pulling out of cloud for core production infrastructure and migrating to col-located data centre. For a number of reasons, one of those reasons is the trojan costs, another is the potential to become captive. Development and test will still use cloud services.
In the USA the GOP wanted business to control things because governments are corrupt and bad for business. but when businesses succeed the GOP wants government to control business. i.e. business is only good if it supports the GOP and their god.
When big business has outsourced everything overseas and pocketed enormous profits said businesses and the GOP want the government to subsidise investments. All very sad.
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