It's interesting
Reading the comments I think one can often get an idea of what kind of people tend to be interested in what aspects is technology. The number of people commenting is clearly small compared to the total readership but nonetheless.
When it comes for instance to "cloud" articles I see a lot of negative comments with one interesting trait: they do not suggest evidence of the commenter having any actual first hand experience with the tech, leading in some cases to wild misconceptions (the biggest being that "it's someone else's computer", private clouds are increasingly common. CERN is one well known example).
My supposition is that a lot of the commentariat consists of computer repair and SMB / corporate IT admin types who are afraid of being put out of a job.
This is not to say that running stuff on public clouds is necessarily a good idea on practical, security or financial terms, obviously there are massive question marks there (which is why I'm very parsimonious with public clouds and stay clear of US vendors), but that shouldn't lead to a dismissal of the technology out of hand. After all, it is basically just a marketing name for something we've been doing all along: a bunch of scripts and more or less half arsed APIs to automate remote server management. It might be somebody else's server, or it might not.
TL;DR from my own experience:
* Proprietary public clouds (AWS, etc): great choice if your goal is vendor lock in and being completely at the mercy of the provider.
* Non-proprietary public clouds (usually OpenStack): do your own assessment, factoring in financial and risk analyses. They are useful in some cases, such as stuff that's supposed to be on the internet to start with, as a plan B for disaster recovery or as a standby to handle infrequent peak loads.
* Private clouds (usually OpenStack or your own, probably shittier, solution): with the advances in visualisation of the last couple decades (containers and so on) we're at a stage where it is possible to repurpose computers on the fly and this means real opportunities for cost (and therefore environmental impact) savings by keeping computers busier more of the time.
PS: A good example of the potential benefits of the last two options is the French government's cloud policy (and infrastructure). They use a private / public mix more or less as described above. Mind, to be a supplier you need to pass a reputedly very hard certification based on ISO-27001 (and basically be European).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
