[Geek]: Dark Clouds on the Horizon

Sun 14th Feb 10, 9.10pm

Since August I've been pitching to buy new G6 server to replacing our aging ESX clusters, since half our infrastructure won't support vSphere.  I've given presentations to several Managers up the chain, waiting patiently to see whether my employers can or will stump up the money. 

During this process one of the Managers asked a question that actually turned my stomach :-

"Why should we bother buying new servers?  Why don't we just put everything into the Cloud?"

Christ on a bike!  How do you answer a question of such staggering Pointy-Haired ignorance?   Do you drive them off the road and hope they hire someone with more sense?  But it's not just one man, all Senior Management seem to be reading the same hyperbolic white papers and business page articles.  Cloud is the answer to everything.

Two more worrying developments came just last week :-

1.  One of our development teams has written a production application for a major power company FULLY DEPLOYED IN THE CLOUD.  That's right, production data on an Oracle DB server hosted in a US Amazon datacenter. 

Despite the fact NZ has one Internet pipe out of the country, via Australia, and is constantly saturated.  (ISPs give you 2 speeds, one for domestic traffic, the other for International).
Despite the fact NZ networking is a joke, with ISP outages or power cuts nearly every month reducing uptimes for external networking to third world levels.
Despite the fact that the customer demanded cloud hosting at the start of the project, then FORGOT WHY halfway through.
Despite hosting customer data at an unknown, offshore location, subject to US Patriot Act intrusion and making us liable for SOX compliance (scratching of heads when we mentioned that).
This all done without the involvement of an infrastructure engineer - they ended up deploying four different operating systems across the service, including one we don't support.

Now they're expecting it to go live, and for us to manage it 24x7!  Another steaming turd flying over the fence...

2.  A developer has asked us to open up SQL (yes, 1433) out to the Internet so he can connect to an Azure SQL instance.

I kid you not.  Rather than use a virtual server internally, or even -- shock horror -- our beefy physical SQL servers,  developers are actively deploying data into the cloud, f*ck knows where, with snapshots as their backups, with not a thought to timeouts, network corruptions or security concerns.    This in a week when our domestic ISP's DNS portal timed out and fritzed our public zone!   The lunatics have truly taken over the asylum.

Now I don't wish to be a total naysayer on Cloud computing.  I've tested Amazon EC2 and server performance is good and there are going to be some instances where it will be the best way to go.  But IMHO anyone planning to deploy production systems into the Cloud in 2010 have balls of steel, or are complete idiots. 

This year will see the first major outage of a cloud provider -- Azure experienced a Blue Cloud of Death in Beta -- and I wouldn't want to be the one telling my CEO that we've lost a major bucket of business critical data that we can't get back.  When your ISP or Cloud provider goes titsup what can your IT Support people do?  Pick up the phone and sit on hold with a thousand other people, that's what.

The good news is I've had the green light to lease some new hardware, so hopefully I'll soon have some funky new vSphere clusters in place to provide a compelling case against developers fleeing into the Cloud like lemmings.  (Though I'm yet to find a decent Private Cloud portal app).

I am quite concerned though that, in 3 years time once the Cloud has had time to mature and become accepted as the "norm" for most new applications, the need for physical infrastructure within large organisations will be vastly reduced.  Companies will still need some IT support presence to manage their servers or services, but I for one don't see any enjoyment or fulfilment in performing all of my systems admin work through a web page.  I really hope I'm wrong, but I suspect the next few years will see an exodus of experienced IT staff retraining into new fields ...

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[Simon Bodecott]

Update:  We now have a team deploying a production service into IBM's cloud solution.  Never heard of it?  THAT'S BECAUSE IT'S NOT GONE LIVE YET!!   Have emailed Management saying that we urgently need to embrace Cloud and learn how to use it so we can support the technology and stay involved in the decision-making process, rather than be circumvented as it currently the case.