Why don't you want to use Cloud Computing?

Question

Our company is considering moving from hosting our own servers to EC2, and I was wondering if this was a good idea.

I saw a lot of things about whether cloud computing (and EC2 in particular) can do x, or it can be y, but my real question is why you DO NOT want to use it?

If you were creating a business, what are the reasons (beyond cost) that you would choose to solve the problems of managing your own servers?

I know that there are many estimated costs that you can use regarding bandwidth, disk usage, etc., but, of course, there are other costs for maintaining your own server. For the sake of this discussion, I agree to consider the costs approximately equal.

I think I remember that Joel Spolsky blurred it a bit, but I could not find him.

Anyone have a reason?

Thank!

Answer 1

I can think of several reasons why not use EC2 (and I'm talking about EC2, not grid comp at all):

• Reliability : Amazon makes no warranties regarding EC2 availability / downtime / security
• Security : Amazon makes no guarantees as to who it will disclose your data to.
• Persistence : Keeping your data alive (including system setup efforts) is harder over EC2
• Management : very few integrated cloud management tools deployed on EC2
• Network : A virtual network that allows EC2 instances to communicate has some rather painful limitations (latency, lack of multicast, arbitrary topological location).

And to end this:

• Cost : In the long run, if you do not use EC2 to absorb peak traffic, it will be much more expensive than investing in your own servers (cheap servers such as Supermicro cost only a couple hundred dollars ...)

On the other hand, I still think that EC2 is a great way to absorb insensitive peak traffic if your architecture allows it.

Answer 2

Some questions:

What is the expected uptime and how does downtime affect your business? What service level agreement can you get, what are the penalties for its absence, and how confident are you that the SLA goal will be achieved? (They may be better or worse at maintaining systems than you.)

How sensitive is the data that you propose to put in the cloud? Again, we turn to the question of how safe the supplier is promises, what are the contractual penalties and compensation, and how confident you are that the supplier will comply with the agreement. In addition, there may be external requirements. If you are dealing with health-related data in the United States, you are subject to very stringent requirements. If you are dealing with credit card information, you also have responsibilities (contractual, not legal).

How easy would it be to refuse an agreement, should the service not be as expected, or if you find a better deal elsewhere? This includes not only the return of your data, but also some version of the applications that you used. Consider the possibility of your provider becoming bankrupt (Amazon is not going to go bankrupt in the near future, but they can separate a cloud provider, which can then go bankrupt) or have an internal reorganization. Keep in mind that a company with serious problems may not live up to your service expectations.

How much independence will you have? Will you manage your software or the software you choose? How easy is it to reconfigure?

What is the pricing scheme? Is it possible for bills to fall into unacceptable levels without an adequate warning?

What is a disaster plan? Ideally, it runs your software on servers in another place where the disaster occurred.

What does your legal department (or corporate lawyer) think about the contract? Is there a dispute resolution mechanism, and if so, is that true for you?

Finally, what do you expect from moving to the cloud? What are you willing to pay? What can you compromise and what do you need?

Answer 3

Highly sensitive data may be better controlled by yourself. And there is legislation; some sensitive data, for example, may not leave the country.

In addition, in addition to Microsoft Azure in combination with SDS, data warehouses are usually not relational, which in some cases is unpleasant.

Answer 4

It may be worrying that an agent Smith from the government will likely be contacting such a large company to spy on everyone who is a small, small provider somewhere.

A large company - more customers - more data for aggregating and recognizing patterns - more resources for organizing a complex watch system.

Maybe it's more of a fantasy, but who ever knows?

If you do not have paranoia, this does not mean that you are not being watched.

Answer 5

Big: if Amazon goes down, there is nothing you can do to get it back.

I'm not talking about doomsday scenarios where a company disappears. I mean, you are in the grip of their downtime without resorting to your own experience.

Answer 6

• Security - you do not know what is being done with your data.
• Dependency - Your business is now directly interwoven with the provider.

Answer 7

There are various types of cloud computing with many different providers providing it. It will make me nervous to encode my applications for working with one cloud provider. what you definitely needed to code ... amazon and Microsoft. I believe that you need to specifically code for this platform - perhaps Google.

However, I recently dropped my own dedicated servers and switched to the Rackspaces Mosso Cloud platform (which does not have the necessary proprietary encoding), and I am still really happy with it. Cut my expenses in half, and productivity is much better than before. My SQL Server databases now run on 64-bit enterprise versions of SQL Server with 32 GB of RAM, which would cost me a fortune in my previous provider infrastructure.

As much as you were unlucky when the cloud fell, it was true that if my dedicated server went down - it never happened, but if my dedicated server crashed, I’m not sure that it will return online any faster than rackspace may return its cloud.

Answer 8

Lack of control.

Answer 9

Putting your software on another cloud is a transfer of some control. They can set a file size limit for downloads or memory limits that can ruin your application. A security vulnerability in the control panel could lead to hacking of your site.

Answer 10

Security issues are not relevant if your application performs its own encryption. Amazon then stores the encrypted data so that it does not have the ability to decrypt.

But in addition to uptime issues, Amazon may decide to increase the price of what they want. If you depend on them, you just have to pay.

Answer 11

Depends on how much you trust your own infrastructure compared to a third-party cloud service. In my opinion, most enterprises (at least not related to IT) should choose later ones.

Answer 12

Another thing that you lose with the cloud is the ability to choose exactly the operating system you want to run. For example, the latest Fedora Linux kernel available on EC2 is FC8, and the latest version of Windows Server 2003.

Answer 13

In addition, issues related to reliability, reliability and cost are a matter of data ownership. When you find data on a foreign server, you no longer control who sees, accesses, modifies or uses this data. Although cloud operators may restrict your access, you have no way to restrict them or restrict access to them. Yes, you can encrypt all the data on the server, but you don’t have any way to find out who has root access to the server itself, and any means that allows other users to download your encrypted data and crack it. You are losing control of your data; depending on what types of applications you use, as well as the patented nature of the data, this can cause corporate security and / or liability risks.

Another factor to consider is what will happen to your company if Amazon and / or EC2 suddenly disappear overnight. Although this is a seemingly ridiculous position, this can happen. Can you quickly fill the hole and restore the service, or will your potentially profitable applications languish and IT staff will seek servers and bandwidth to bring them online? In addition, what will happen to your data? A cloud hard drive containing all of your information still exists and may pose a potential liability risk depending on the information you have stored - such as personal information, business records, etc.

If I started my own business now, I would have faced the problem of buying and supporting my own outages, so I retained ownership of the data. I could control the root access to the equipment, as well as control who can receive and modify data.

Answer 14

Unanswered security issues.

Indeed, you want your IP to be where you do not control it?

Answer 15

Most cloud computing environments are at least partially vendor specific. There is no good way to move things from one cloud to another without requiring a lot of rewriting. Such a lock puts you in the good of one supplier when it comes to downtime, price increases, etc. If you rent or own your own servers, hosting providers and colossi are largely interchangeable. You always have the opportunity to move somewhere else.

This may change in the future as these things become standardized, but cloud-bounds now bind you to a specific provider.

Answer 16

Cloud computing has led to parallel programming a little closer to the masses, but you still need to understand how best to use it - otherwise you are going to waste computing cycles and bandwidth.

Re-archiving your application for the most efficient use of the cloud computing service is non-trivial.

Answer 17

This is similar to the comment "Why are you using Linux", which I received from the manual many years ago. The answer I received was that this is a solution to finding the problem.

So what are your goals and objectives when switching to EC2?

I would be interested to know if you want to move to the cloud, if it was your own.

Answer 18

In addition to what has been said here, we must consider uniformity in business. Are all the applications that will be hosted in the cloud, or only most? It is best to use the trigger when using the cloud, when you still need to have staff to handle several special servers?

In particular, there may be special equipment that you need to communicate with such modems to receive incoming data or voice cards that make automatic phone calls. I do not know how this could be handled in a cloud environment.