spyguy Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 30 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Do be careful with AWS, I know several firms that have ended up with surprise bills. One for £200k Im planning on trialling some ideas on AWS. Just web front end stuff. Im choosing the capping option. I'd be very wary off putting grunt compute on there - unless I was a one man band setup who suddenly found something that 1000000s of people wanted, over the world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dgul Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 I'm not convinced by cloud hosting - the costs look high to me. I have to say that the interesting stuff is still bespoke -- if you can get it off the shelf I'm not interested. Anyway, what's wrong with sticking with what you know? I make a fair income just translating (and trouble shooting) from Fortran -> C -> Pascal (Delphi) these days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 3 hours ago, Fairyland said: One of our meetings got cancelled and we talking about this article with global peers. It seems similar news are running globally. An Indian colleague pointed us to a slowing down IT sector - Infy, TCS nos show IT industry is dying slow death Their government has started cutting down rates but official inflation figures do not reflect real life, he said. "Welcome to our world" I thought. There's a good chance that Indian offshoring is the reason why lots of people are running from Infosys and TCS. The word oversold and overpriced doe not come into with most Indian stuff. Some orgs I know were looking to go bacj to paper and pencil after their experience. I cannotthink of any org I deal with who would even consider any form off offshoing, be it business processes, development, or full transfer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 The other big issue with cloud and the DevOps movement is that it does often fail to consider what infrastructure is underneath. You do occasionally get developers who don't understand the difference between data durability and system availability. Also developers who don't understand availability zones in a cloud services versus having back up copies. Search Codespaces to find one example. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 11 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: The other big issue with cloud and the DevOps movement is that it does often fail to consider what infrastructure is underneath. You do occasionally get developers who don't understand the difference between data durability and system availability. Also developers who don't understand availability zones in a cloud services versus having back up copies. Search Codespaces to find one example. You mean spending $$$ on a HA fail over system and connecting them to the same BT router? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted October 14, 2016 Share Posted October 14, 2016 30 minutes ago, spyguy said: You mean spending $$$ on a HA fail over system and connecting them to the same BT router? That sort of thing, but overly relying on cloud to provide resilience when it doesn't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Bowman Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 (edited) On 14/10/2016 at 0:49 PM, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Yep agree with you on this. I work for a fairly large firm, and we have a global presence, and so IT thought Office 365 made sense, especially as we do have partnerships with MS. But so far I have not been impressed. Office 365 started out OK, but it seems to be grinding to a halt - it isn't my device as I have tested different devices with differnet OSes etc and different networks. Something somewhere in O365 doesn't scale very week. On the flip side, as decent alternative to crappy Yahoo, I am happy to fork out for Office 365 for home use. ML absolutely all the power of Exchange which has been sorted for years for individual users at peanuts great but have heard similar stories like yours from large scale installs. On your other point re resillence. The one single point of failure in to any building is the comms - two suppliers normally means Virgin and BT going through the same duct to the same Exchange. The only guaranteed resilience is through a BT RA2 (certified diverse different routes /exchanges) line very people want to pay for that and the cloud jockeys never highlight this unsurprisingly since not cheap Edited October 16, 2016 by Greg Bowman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EssKay Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 On 14 October 2016 at 5:36 PM, Chunketh said: The great thing about working in IT is that you don't get to rest on your laurels. Advance or get off shored. This for me is the biggest "hidden" benefit of working on IT - it forces you to constantly advance and learn stuff to stay relevant and employable. Automation may cause certain roles to disappear and certain skills to become irrelevant but until AI becomes viable, there will be new opportunities created for those who are flexible enough. That flexible mindset also gives IT bods an edge if they ever need to change career - they are already adept at re-learning their trade Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 1 hour ago, Greg Bowman said: ML absolutely all the power of Exchange which has been sorted for years for individual users at peanuts great but have heard similar stories like yours from large scale installs. On your other point re resillence. The one single point of failure in to any building is the comms - two suppliers normally means Virgin and BT going through the same duct to the same Exchange. The only guaranteed resilience is through a BT RA2 (certified diverse different routes /exchanges) line very people want to pay for that and the cloud jockeys never highlight this unsurprisingly since not cheap Ms excjange is a bit of a monster. Anything conndcted to netwofking shoved in a sinhle product. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scunnered Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 22 minutes ago, spyguy said: Ms excjange is a bit of a monster. Anything conndcted to netwofking shoved in a sinhle product. Yeah, and the spellchecker's really rubbish as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 1 minute ago, Scunnered said: Yeah, and the spellchecker's really rubbish as well. own petards! ms exchange is a pig! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eek Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 1 hour ago, spyguy said: own petards! ms exchange is a pig! Which is one of the real benefits of office 365. All that awkward keeping an exchange server going is just done for you in the background... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 15 minutes ago, eek said: Which is one of the real benefits of office 365. All that awkward keeping an exchange server going is just done for you in the background... Which is fine until you 1000 staff sat on their arses with 365 not working. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stormymonday_2011 Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 (edited) On 10/14/2016 at 5:39 PM, Chunketh said: I thought that for a while but the landscape has changed. As another reply has stated, Amazon are doing it right and making a killing from it. Why would you want to go to the trouble of setting up a DC when you can rent the CPU cycles you need at a fixed cost? What's the difference. Ultimately those CPUs reside in a DC. I work in a heavily Cloud orientated environment using multiple Cloud providers. I haven't noticed the systems being that much more resilient than they were in the old DC nor is it necessarily much cheaper if the system gets specified incorrectly. Once you start needing more Virtual Memory, CPU and Disk storage the costs can escalate quite quickly on these bureau solutions just as they did on the old mainframe systems. Moreover in the Cloud what you are buying is not necessarily what you get. Your virtual CPU may be mapped to a logical CPU that itself only use part of a physical CPU. I have seen virtualised machines supposedly running at 100% capacity when viewed from the virtual machine that are in reality waiting for resources to become available on the physical machine because Cloud suppliers routinely overcommit them (i.e. promise to provide more CPU or Memory to multiple customers than they actually have available). In my experience hardly anybody in IT management and procurement really understands this fact apart from a few relics surviving from the era of mainframe. The quality of the Work Load Management system used by the Cloud provider to manage demand is crucial and in my experience not all are up to the job. Edited October 16, 2016 by stormymonday_2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 (edited) 4 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Which is fine until you 1000 staff sat on their arses with 365 not working. I worked fof a very large 200k employee co. hhat was hit by the red worm thing. No corp. computers were turned on for 4 days. Whatever saving ms promised was lost for the next 10 years with that. Edited October 16, 2016 by spyguy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 17 minutes ago, spyguy said: I worked fof a very large 200k employee co. hhat was hit by the red worm thing. No corp. computers were turned on for 4 days. Whatever saving ms promised was lost for the next 10 years with that. Yikes, but all too common. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stormymonday_2011 Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 (edited) 27 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Which is fine until you 1000 staff sat on their arses with 365 not working. And that is the crux of the Cloud computing problem. You are not in control when things go wrong and in my experience they do, they do.... If you own the system end to end then you can be sure that most of those involved in fixing it have it as the number one priority. That is not necessarily going to be the case in the Cloud where providers might decide that getting your 1,000 users back online is less important in terms of Service Agreement Costs than the 10,000 users impacted by another problem that just happen to work for your main business competitor. Regarding IT as just a commodity resource is crazy in a world where for most companies the quality and availability of what the IT does is vital. In fact for many modern companies IT is the bloody business from supply chain, through accounting to direct customer interface. Only in the Alice In Wonderland world of modern industry could business managers regard it as an incidental cost like paper clips in the old pre IT offices of the past. Edited October 16, 2016 by stormymonday_2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eek Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 31 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Which is fine until you 1000 staff sat on their arses with 365 not working. You mitigate it. One reason for office 365 rather than google apps is that you continue (for a small extra monthly fee like £2) with the desktop apps on all the machines. You bin active directory and exchange and use Microsoft's azure version. Granted there is still a downside the £200,000 a year saving of not having exchange in house makes up for it 99 times out of 100. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 6 minutes ago, stormymonday_2011 said: And that is the crux of the Cloud computing problem. You are not in control when things go wrong and in my experience they do, they do.... If you own the system end to end then you can be sure that most of those involved in fixing it have it as the number one priority. That is not necessarily going to be the case in the Cloud where providers might decide that getting your 1,000 users back online is less important in terms of Service Agreement Costs than the 10,000 users impacted by another problem that just happen to work for your main business competitor. Regarding IT as just a commodity resource is crazy in a world where for most companies the quality and availability of what the IT does is vital. In fact for many modern companies IT is the bloody business from supply chain, through accounting to direct customer interface. Only in the Alice In Wonderland world of modern industry could business managers regard it as an incidental cost like paper clips in the old pre IT offices of the past. Nicely summed up. On the point of prioritising your fix, you are also very right. I know for instance one large vendor that deliberately delivers poor service as it is cheaper to pay the penalties on some contracts than fix the issue. So if that is the cases, what happens when there isn't a meaningful SLA! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stormymonday_2011 Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 (edited) 18 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Nicely summed up. On the point of prioritising your fix, you are also very right. I know for instance one large vendor that deliberately delivers poor service as it is cheaper to pay the penalties on some contracts than fix the issue. So if that is the cases, what happens when there isn't a meaningful SLA! Surely no one goes into a Cloud computing solution without a watertight SLA with the provider do they......? And one does not even want to think about the implications of your bargain basement Cloud provider going bust .... http://diginomica.com/2015/01/06/cios-worst-nightmare-cloud-provider-goes-bankrupt/ http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/07/06/frank_jennings_cloud_insolvency/ Moreover no guarantee that the company from which you are buying the Cloud Service actually owns the hardware. They might be renting it themselves in someone else's D.C. in that case the D.C. owner might decide to pull the plug themselves if they have not been paid. At this stage it is all getting very messy and your systems may never be coming back.... Edited October 16, 2016 by stormymonday_2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Bowman Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 14 minutes ago, stormymonday_2011 said: They might be renting it themselves in someone else's D.C. in that case the D.C. owner might decide to pull the plug themselves if they have not been paid. At this stage it is all getting very messy and your systems may never be coming back.... They generally are, even BT talk about their data centres but often it is a few racks they have leased as points of presence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stormymonday_2011 Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 38 minutes ago, Greg Bowman said: They generally are, even BT talk about their data centres but often it is a few racks they have leased as points of presence That highlights the other risk. Your Cloud provide might be a functioning and solvent entity but their D.C. supplier can go down itself. I doubt many businesses really have the DR solution in place to cope with all these complex contigencies. As has already been said you don't need a full on catastrophe for those Cloud savings to evaporate. Just a few days downtime with your staff getting paid for twiddling their thumbs doing nothing while they wait for the systems to come back can wipe out years of supposed Cloud economies almost immediately. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ccc Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 A very large - I can't name names of course - UK bank has recently dropped it's day rate used for resource cost forecasting for Indian based staff/contractors/consultancies Make of that what you will. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyguy Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 3 minutes ago, ccc said: A very large - I can't name names of course - UK bank has recently dropped it's day rate used for resource cost forecasting for Indian based staff/contractors/consultancies Make of that what you will. Priced in £ or $? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ccc Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 1 minute ago, spyguy said: Priced in £ or $? £ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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