Do you trust the "Cloud?"

[Derrel]

Using it and trusting it are two separate things.

So much BS in this thread.

Oh, by the way, the Green Bay Packers had their game plan on cloud servers before tonight's game...they got killed 16-36 by the Seahawks. So, we KNOW the cloud is super-secure and hack-proof. Just ask all the actresses with their nudie pics on 4Chan! It's totally safe. No, seriously. Un-hackable. Totally secure.

Trust me, I know what I'm doing. This war will be over by Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?
;-)

 

[minicoop1985]

Do I trust the could?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Hell no.

Do I trust my HD? No... but that's a different story. I have nothing to steal anyway lol

 

[unpopular]

I trust it OK, I guess - from a security standpoint. But I don't find it very practical.

 

[manaheim]

Keep in mind that without the public cloud, companies and products like Uber, Flipboard, AirBnB, FourSquare, Yelp, SmugMug, Apple iCloud, Pinterest, Shazam, IMDB, and thousands of others wouldn't even exist. These companies either don't want, or can't afford, to run their own global datacenters. Their products only exist because the cloud exists. Netflix runs on the cloud (Amazon AWS).

"Public cloud" is a bit of on odd term. Those are all private industries owned and/or purchased by other private industries.

Also, saying something only exists because the cloud exists is a logical fallacy... at least in this case. You cannot say with any amount of certainty that Netflix would not exist without the cloud, because it's a complex system with many variables, and where one technology does not exist, another may rise to fill that spot. Also... in fact, I'm reasonably certain that Neflix existed before the term "cloud" was conceived. Same for IMDB.

Also also... the term "cloud" is like a lot of other fad terms about technology... it doesn't really mean all that everyone thinks it does, and it's not really all that new. Before the cloud we had something called "application service provider"... which basically meant "Hey, we're a big ISP... we can host your applications here!" And we're talking about 14-16 years ago. It's not EXACTLY what the cloud means today, but then... really... you can't concretely define "cloud" anymore than you could "application service provider". (by the way, this is right around the same time Netflix rolled onto the scene in force)

I have a small customer (about 300 employees) that just built out an entire failover datacenter in the cloud (Microsoft Azure). They got a quote for $750,000 from a traditional business continuity provider to build a hosted failover datacenter, which they couldn't even come close to being able to afford, so my customer instead built the entire thing on Microsoft's cloud for an estimated $40,000 - $50,000 per year. The cloud is enabling businesses to have access to massive scale compute and business intelligence systems to help them run their own businesses better, that they would have never in a million years had the financial and personnel capital to build and maintain themselves.

Meh. This is arguable. I've run some very large IT organizations and I can tell you from experience that you can do a LOT of the things that some of these cloud providers do internally... and keep costs down to similar levels... but you have to do it right. The problem is that most IT places and people are generalists, and only "so good" at certain things (and in many cases pretty awful at most things- the average IT person sucks at his job, just like any other industry). Therefore, most companies do not have the skillset necessary to do something amazing.

Since many cloud providers are more focused, and their profitability is dependent on productizing a service like this, so they are required to refine their skillset with a very sharp focus. So yeah, generally, they do it better and cheaper.

Adobe's cloud runs on top of Amazon's cloud (AWS). Seems strange when you really think about it, but Adobe CC wouldn't exist unless the public cloud already existed. Adobe wants to sell software, they don't want to build a global cloud infrastructure. So they were able to use someone else's cloud as a vehicle to sell their software. NBC used the cloud (Microsoft Azure) to stream all the real-time and on-demand HD streams of the Sochi Olympics. Everytime you used an app on your smartphone, tablet, PC, or laptop to check the schedules, medal count, or watch an event, you were using Microsoft's cloud. It was the largest media streaming system ever built and guess what...it mostly doesn't even exist anymore. Thanks to the cloud they built it all then when the Olympics were over simply turned it all off and walked away. That simply isn't possible without the cloud.

Again, no. They'd just setup a bunch of DCs or hire out to an accelerator company like Akamai. You might be able to argue Akamai is a cloud provider, but you'd be stretching the definition further than you have already.

It's not all about the economies of scale driven costs that Manaheim is alluding to either. The cloud creates an equal playing field. 5 person startups now have access to the same compute capacity that a Proctor & Gamble or General Electric do. A good friend of mine is right now launching a startup that performs massive data mining against the buy/sell ratings of stock analysts to predict which analysts will be right and wrong under which scenarios. His startup is 2 people and he's secured a ton of venture capital. His startup only exists because the cloud exists - the IP that he's building runs on Microsoft Azure and leverages its big data and machine learning services. Technology can be a competitive advantage and now, thanks to the cloud, small startups can have access to the same - or better - technology than global enterprises.

You just said it was not about economies and costs, and then very effectively showed that it's all about scale and cost. Your buddy couldn't start his company without the cloud because... why? Because doing it the old fashioned way would have been STUPIDLY expensive and because the cloud vendors have productized and packaged their service in chunks digestible by everyone from your friend all the way up to Adobe and Microsoft.

A sizeable chunk of the apps on your smartphone only exist because of the cloud. Independent developers are able to build apps that do really cool things thanks to really cheap compute capacity offered by public cloud providers. Get rid of the cloud, and your smartphone becomes a lot less smart.

Again, no.

Threads like this are silly because every single person on this thread that said they don't trust the cloud is already consuming and relying on the cloud in far more ways than they realize. The cloud is embedded into everything and you're all using it and trusting it every single day.

Threads like this are not silly. Threads like this are critical for people to discuss and raise awareness of a technology that is growing much faster and more out of control than everyone realizes. As you said... pretty much everyone has something in the cloud, whether they know it or not.

That said, what threads like this CAN do is confuse people pretty badly. While many of your comments are not "wrong", they glaze over some important concepts and can confuse people.

 

[usayit]

eh... Cloud is a fancy term for an abstraction of storage, network, and compute. It all eventually lands on the same hardware on the same systems that have been around for decades. This abstraction allows for a repackaging (and thus sold) of these resources.

I find it curious when people cannot trust "Cloud" to the same degree they trust other online services for storage and hosting.

 

[runnah]

What do I know, I still use a portable hard drive.

 

[robbins.photo]

What do I know, I still use a portable hard drive.

Wait, they make hard drives that are portable now?

Huh.. well I'll be...

 

[runnah]

What do I know, I still use a portable hard drive.

Wait, they make hard drives that are portable now?

Huh.. well I'll be...

Beats zip disks.

 

[robbins.photo]

What do I know, I still use a portable hard drive.

Wait, they make hard drives that are portable now?

Huh.. well I'll be...

Beats zip disks.

Those are the big ones you can use to fan yourself with when the room gets too warm, right?

 

[snerd]

Isn't it safe to say that this "cloud" thing is just your stuff on someone else's computer?

 

[tecboy]

Don't you guys get it?! The cloud is the Matrix! We are a bunch of batteries powering the Matrix. Everything we see is not real. It is all 100% pure cgi.

 

[slackercruster]

No, not a cloud user. I keep my work all over hell on drives and DVD's. I guess I'd use the cloud as a final back up, but I don't bother. I'm not worried about theft, just access when I need it.

 

[xzyragon]

I keep all my work on the cloud. But i'm also not really selling images either (yet) so I haven't had to worry about it.