Hi Everyone, I just wanted to take a moment and start a thread on the current state of "The Cloud". While it's not a term I'm particularly fond of, I've found the value proposition of PaaS like Amazon AWS & Google App Engine to be compelling (haven't really tried any of the others).
Thus far I've only used "The Cloud", for toy apps and demos, I haven't even considered banking an entire business on it. Recently though I was in a discussion with a client who has run the numbers and realized that they will save about 80% on infrastructure costs if they offload all their IT into a cloud solution. Frankly, this is giving me a gut twisting feeling but I'm not sure why. My first instinct was to try and bring up the AWS outage last April that knocked so many people offline for so long. However this setup is designed to resist that sort of outage by leveraging geographically diverse data centers and pushing static content to edge servers (Elastic Beanstalk + CloudFront). Other than that I can't really think of anymore objections to it, but something doesn't feel right and I just can't put my finger on it. So I'm soliciting the feedback of the group to help me come up with a proper list of pros & cons for moving the workload of about 20 servers off into the cloud. For the record the client has 20 servers located in a single datacenter, and it was during the design of their business continuity plan that they realized they suffer from the potential for a catastrophic single point of failure. Client is a healthcare records management & billing company, so HIPAA & PCI are both significant concerns. But they do have strong encryption on the data and there are pretty tight controls on who exactly gets access to what data. Thoughts? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
