On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 07:25:23AM -0400, Evan Pettrey wrote: > Greetings, > > I've been asked to put together a presentation on the pros and cons of cloud > computing and a recommendation for what, if anything, can be moved to the > cloud which will result in a net savings that will be worth any additional > problems/headaches.
I think the whole conversation is easier if you don't say "cloud" - instead, say "outsourcing" - this is what you are doing, and most people understand the latter better than the former. Is it sometimes good? sure, but most business people also understand that you don't want to outsource your core business. > - Aside from email, what other types of services are most suitable for > moving to the cloud? First, identify things that could be outsourced. Look at things that are peripheral to your business. This is different for every business; Managing hardware and network is core to my business, and what I spend most of my money on. The EC2 premium would kill me. But other people? sometimes they'd rather focus on other things, and servers are a small enough cost that paying the ec2 premium doesn't hurt them much. An example of something I could reasonably outsource is email. I mean, it's important, but I could pay a lot more than I need to for email without it breaking me, and an email glitch won't kill the company, and if I'm suddenly paying 2x as much for email 'cause my provider knows it's hard for me to switch? it's such a trivial amount of money that it doesn't really matter. An example of something I'd like to outsource but I can't (because there isn't a good enough product) is my spreadsheets and other ms-office compatable nonsense. But google docs isn't even up to the standard of openoffice or gnucash yet. Another thing to look at is what, exactly, you are buying. Amazon gives you instant provisioned disposable compute nodes, and they are good at that; but some people think this means they obsolete your SysAdmin, which is silly; amazon replaces your rack/stack kid, and greatly reduces the workload of your network person. They don't reduce your *NIX admin's workload much at all, save for the provisioning system setup. Remember, renting, over the long term, is nearly always more expensive than buying. In the short term, the opposite is true. > - How can latency as a result of things being stored offsite be > circumvented? find a provider in your region. 60ms latency, for most things, doesn't matter. Of course, if your problem is bandwidth rather than latency, this become a huge problem that can be partily mitigated through caching. http://www.zettar.com/ is one example of a cache for "cloud storage" providers, but caching is usually application specific. (I know the zettar guy; almost went in with him on some projects. Good guy.) > - What cloud service providers are worth looking into and where can I > find a general idea of what pricing would be like? > - I realize Amazon is one of the big ones but based on their recent > disaster and the constant downtime of reddit (which I've read is due to > Amazon), they seem like a poor choice If you use ec2 for what it is, e.g. disposable compute nodes, it is great. The problem with the outage and with reddit was primarly with EBS; amazon's attempt to provide persistant distributed storage accessable in a posix-like way. This is a very hard problem to solve at scale. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
