The Reality of ‘THE CLOUD’

John Thuma
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

I was at lunch the other day with an old friend I used to work with many years ago. She and I were discussing her current project and their plans on moving to the cloud. She was so excited. Being who I am I started to dig a bit more and asked her some questions.

So I asked “This project you are working on is going to the cloud, why?” She answered back in surprise as if I should have already known the answer. But she continued. “John, the cloud is it! Everyone is going there and so are we. We can do anything in the cloud!” I didn’t want to get into a heated discussion about the cloud and what it is... but… she made it out to be a magical place where solutions just happen and the world is a panacea of brilliance and grace. I am amazed at how people just pick up on the next big thing like it is a cure for male pattern baldness. (btw if you can solve this problem in the cloud: call my my phone number is: 813–555–1212 — Like I am going to give you my real phone number)

So according to my lunch companion the cloud can do the following:

  • Make magical solutions come out of nowhere that did not exist on premises.
  • Reduce complexity and the esoteric challenges faced by data and just organizational evolution.
  • Lower costs and make things easier to spin up and down.
  • Data, data everywhere and all of our analytical needs will be met because people will be free!

I like this person and want to remain her friends so I nodded and said “COOL!” I quickly changed the subject to her family, which she loves to talk about! We finished lunch and had a nice conversation and parted as friends!

SO LET’S SNAP BACK TO REALITY! Lets take a look at the four points above!

Make magical solutions come out of nowhere that did not exist on premises.

What is the cloud? What isn’t the cloud? The cloud is just a place where a bunch of computing equipment and software lives that you have ZERO real ownership over. Think of it as someone else’s datacenter that you rent or borrow for a fee. Yes, you can fire up an instance of a development environment, a network, and some storage very quickly. You can also turn it off quickly. You can also persist your solution there long term. YOU STILL HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING! SECURITY IS STILL IMPORTANT. Writing software that can elastically scale is HARD! (elastically means add more servers or increase the size of a server — you know scale up or scale out)

The cloud is not a solution to a complex project. It won’t magically make software development happen. It will not reduce the complexity of software or solution development. Just because I can spin up an MS SQL Server instance quickly doesnt mean the data will get there and it is auto backed up. You still have to do these things. BUMMER!

Reduce complexity and the esoteric challenges faced by data and just organizational evolution.

Your business rules are still your business rules regardless if your hardware and software exist in-house or in the cloud. In fact you might have some regulatory matters to contend with if you move to a public cloud and your customers may feel a bit uneasy about it. What this means is your data problems don’t go away just because you have moved your data to someone else’s datacenter that you borrow. You still have data quality, consistency, and the challenges of turning that data into useful information to be concerned about. The cloud does not have a bunch of magical programming unicorns that come out of nowhere and eliminate these problems. SORRY, THIS IS A HUGE BUMMER! Magical unicorns sounds like a bunch of puppies! I just want to be there…. :)

Lower costs and make things easier to spin up and down.

There are definite financial advantages to the cloud. They have free instances of stuff to try out. You can spin up, even big things, and turn them off when you don’t need them. It is so easy to stand up a cluster of things and it looks super affordable. $0.01/minute sounds pretty darn cheap. I also don’t have to worry about colocation, HVAC (keeping servers cold), real estate, people to babysit, etc. You are sharing those costs with all the other people who want to keep their servers and software on the borrowed cloud. It’s an intergalactic crazy party of hardware and software JOY!

Sounds pretty amazing and it is. HOWEVER! It is super easy not to pay any attention to it and when you get the BILL… YIKES… Remember the good old days when you could be a mobile plan that only allowed you to use 500 minutes? You know before unlimited talk and data? Ever go over one month?….of course we all did, it is easy to do… There isn’t minute count down thing on your phone… I once went over by 2000 minutes….THEN BAM! HUGE BILL!

AAAHHH.. HUGE BILL! SCARY BILL… CANCEL CHANUKAH, tell Santa to stay home, and cancel any other Holiday because I have to get a home equity line of credit to pay off my mobile bill. Ok a bit dramatic but, sort of true. The cloud has a bunch of hidden costs that you might not be paying attention to and if you let other people in your organization use your account and you don’t pay attention… WHAMMO! So get to know your cloud provider and their costs. This is a massive BUMMER! No presents… no xmas… man…

Data, data everywhere and all of our analytical needs will be met because people will be free!

The cloud is not going to lead your data horses to water and make them drink. People are still people and the cloud will not make them any different. People want answers not ‘THE CLOUD.” So you are still going to have to build solutions that make people work smarter not “CLOUDIER.”

CONCLUSION:

I am not anti cloud at all! I am a huge fan of the cloud but it isn’t the answer to all your problems and has not solved the male pattern baldness thing yet. It can be more affordable if you manage it properly. It can make procurement decisions and agile development faster! It can also make for a lot of headaches too.

HAVE A GREAT LABOR DAY and remember: FIREWORKS, TRAMPOLINES, AND TEQUILA do not go well together, but you are heading in the right direction! Be safe and have fun!

(NOTE: John Thuma does not condone the use of fireworks, trampolines, or tequila, but if you want to party (tuxedo t-shirt style) drop me a call at 813–555–1212)

John Thuma

Written by

Data Nerd! Walking the Data wire for 30 years. If you are serious about data and analytics then I might be interesting to you!

Data Driven Investor

from confusion to clarity, not insanity

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