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What are the clouds and myths about them in the heads of ITshnikov: opinions, stereotypes and life in the "clouds"



Do not rush to immediately minus this post for the title. The fact is that even the most "cool-unwound" ITshniki do not understand what cloud technology is, so what can we say about the rest? The idea of ​​the clouds is very, very vague. About what myths about the clouds are in the heads of ITshnikov (with examples) that we come across, how they see cloud solutions and common stereotypes about clouds - under the cut.

Disclaimer: Everyone understands the cloud in his own way, but still there are some general concepts, and the fact that “it’s understandable” can just be the biggest “misunderstanding stone”!
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In short, cloud data center (virtual private cloud)
This is a computing infrastructure (servers, data warehouses, networks, operating systems) that is provided to clients for deploying and running their own software solutions.

You can manage resources:


Use patterns include traditional

and recently appeared


Much has been written about the use of cloud technologies (SaaS, PaaS, etc.), but the fact is that even these models are not the status quo, and often these models are viewed by the cloud from the point of view of using same as the use of "iron".



Often, even cloud providers themselves do not tell their customers that all these models can be combined and in some sense hybrid. When designing a cloudy IT infrastructure, elements from each cloud usage model can be involved. Of course, you can do anything, the question is: is the customer ready for this? And the customer is just not always ready for this, even in terms of understanding the new cloud capabilities and the possibilities of using them precisely in its infrastructure. This is how the above-mentioned cloud usage models took shape, and providers do not complicate their presentation for the customer too much, as he often is wary of cloud innovation.

Lyrical digression: an example of a cloud approach when solving a problem offline

One large Ukrainian bank was faced with the fact that there are a lot of customers, and in order to serve them all - many cash desks and cashiers are needed, which again causes a lot of overhead costs. And they decided to approach this problem globally: let customers serve themselves in self-service terminals. They decided to decide something, but this is easy to say, but to train and convince several million customers to use terminals is not an easy task. One of the main obstacles is the problem of a psychological nature, people are very hard on something new, even if it is golden, and will solve all their problems - “and I’ve better in the old way ...”, especially for young people who anyway, customers of this bank. I am sure that at first the project was completely unprofitable and demanded only investments, and then more investments, support, debugging and a whole lot more. I think they didn’t have the main thing - strategies how to teach several million customers to use self-service terminals, and not how much to teach, but how to convince people to start using terminals. Other factors have already worked here - the cashier’s queue :) - the best teacher and the reason to use the terminal. At first everything was through the stump-deck, but then it went and everyone started using terminals everywhere - in shops, business centers and now any free space can become a bank branch, since the terminal is able to perform almost all the services of a standard bank branch. The result - the bank was able to serve, and, most importantly - retained most of its customers!


A similar situation exists in the cloud solutions market. The fact is that one of the tasks of providers is often not how much to provide services, how much to carry out explanatory work among clients - to tell what clouds are, etc. (It is for this reason that we have created and are keeping our own Wiki user guide , where we add articles about what clouds are and other answers that most concern our users.)

IT engineers find it hard to change the thinking and understanding of cloud solutions as something new, something that cannot be treated as physical, “iron” solutions. Those who started their way in IT, even 10 years ago (not to mention 20 years), have experienced a rapid growth of IT technologies during this time, comparable to a breakthrough in technology in several industrial revolutions.

And therefore it is not always difficult to change technology - it is more difficult to change (o) consciousness and approach. After all, it is clear that it is difficult to move in step with the market, where often not very market rules rule. (As one engineer honestly said in private conversation: “I honestly say, I became an engineer, because I'm lazy ...” - a good engineer, by the way :)

In addition, quite seriously changed the paradigm of decision making in the IT business. Whereas previously, managers relied entirely on admins, now managers who came out of the engineers are able to understand the technologies themselves and participate in the technical part of decision making, and not only in the managerial part. But even in spite of this tendency, the IT senior executive is often not always aware of the specifics of cloud solutions.



Myths about the clouds


Let's make a brief overview of those myths, stereotypes and misunderstandings about cloud solutions. Here the author outlined several myths. Also, a representative of a vendor who is not very fond of Habré said that they objected to any objections about clouds (although in the comments he said that he did not write this :)

“ It 's enough to virtualize everything to get all the benefits of the cloud”
Virtualization is not equivalent to the cloud. The choice between IaaS and PaaS is a question of what exactly you want to get: computer as a service or database as a service. Suppose you have ten computers with databases and you have virtualized them, collected everything on one powerful server. But at the same time as you had ten databases, it remains so. The load on the administrator has not decreased. If it becomes necessary to clone a database, then it is necessary to clone the entire virtual machine as a whole.

“The cloud is expensive, complicated, requires changing the existing IT infrastructure”
Indeed, if you want to build your own private cloud, you will have to spend money on equipment, software and project implementation.

Of course, the vendor of the equipment on which to build the cloud has its own task. If you create your own cloud, it’s certainly expensive, but if you use a public cloud, you can rent everything, because to fly a plane you don’t have to buy a whole plane, you just need to rent one seat for a couple of hours ...

There are many clients who don’t need a whole server - since it’s expensive for them, but just web hosting isn’t suitable, since there are almost no options in this variant. And in our experience, we can say that there are many customers who need 1 or 2 virtual machines - that's all.

Owners - they don’t need to know what a cloud is - they need an income generating business. But IT administrators and CIOs often do not know what a cloud is. Here is an example from life:

The head of the IT department of a large plant asks: Could you briefly explain the difference between a dedicated server and a cloud? As I understand it, the cloud is essentially GVA - will we share power with the same customers as we? Or does a tighter allocation of resources work? For each virtualku will need to pay? And IOPS and traffic - are they also paid separately?

This is what you have to face all the time.

"It is expensive"

When a client requests a dedicated server, we give it to him, but at the same time we ask him - would you like to try cloud servers? And the first thing we hear: “the server is my server (I have it in the server), and the cloud is something vague” - there is no clarity and physical feeling (which gives the basis of psychological certainty) with a cloud. It scares people.

We have already written that even for a large enterprise it is difficult for customers to part with such a small-minded mentality in which he believes that money, or data, should be kept in a jug under the table. (After all, in fact, paper money is after all, to some extent, a cloud data model - when you have only the designation of what lies in the repository of the country's treasury).

"Publicity"

Everyone is also afraid of the word "public." By virtue of the socio-cultural patterns, our people are mostly closed, and this has a certain effect on the use of cloud technologies. When the word “cloudy” sounds, GoogleGoodrive and Amazon pops up (although it doesn’t bother anyone when they’re storing something on GoogleDrive - although this public cloud is such that it’s not publicly available, the question becomes different when it comes to responsibility for the data). In the case of Google and Amazon - here your data is really “spread” all over the world, it's completely different when your cloud is located in one country (Germany), in one data center.

Virtualization has helped break away from the hardware and reach a new level of abstraction (capabilities) in IT. She helped break away from the hardware, and helped broaden the horizons of using IT technologies. And it was a step towards global virtualization and “cloudization” of many IT services; in the IT sphere, it works and is quite successful.

Now there should be virtualization "in the minds" of ITshnikov.

Capital vs Operational costs

Here is a conditional example of correspondence with a large customer.
Made a commercial offer, received a response from Ishnik:
Thank you, it is very expensive if you buy it, it will pay off in 6 months.

Manager's answer:
Good day!
Thanks for the answer.
A small comment ...
- When you buy a new server, you will immediately receive "capital costs" and costs associated with the cost of storing and operating the equipment (security, power, cooling);
- In the case of renting these resources, the costs you have incurred go to the “operating costs of the enterprise”
- Moreover, you will be able to flexibly respond to changing needs in computing resources, both upwards and downwards ...
- You get the convenience of use and no need to keep a warehouse of spare parts or worries about their purchase.
- In terms of security and business continuity, if you store your data in a secure cloud in Germany, then in our opinion, this will help make the business sustainable and protected from all kinds of surprises.

The client in this case forgets that this is not capital expenditures, where you have to wait for the return of investments invested in the purchase of a solution, you only pay what you already use right now, and not share past or future costs. Here costs only in the present - how much I took for so much and paid.

For example, a client takes a dedicated server, which costs, say, 100 euros, takes a cloud - it costs, for example, 150 euros - “no, it’s more expensive, we don’t want it”. Here again, the problem lies in ignorance of the specifics of cloud solutions. Yes, the server, it is one, but if you want a fault-tolerant server - then you need to at least buy another one the same. Not to mention the fact that you need to configure these 2 servers, and answer a lot of questions: how will they work? How will the data exchange between them? And so on. As a result, to make this bundle - 1 cluster of 2 servers - at a price of 300-400-500 euros, and maybe more. Thus, if you want to make a decision that will be at least somewhat similar to the “cloud equivalent” for 150 euros, it will be much more expensive for you. In the cloud server, already out of the box there is all the functionality necessary for fault tolerance, with an already configured structure. As a result, the cloud server is much cheaper.

“Clouds are (not) safe” (Safe - if at home. Securely - in the server room, securely - in the domestic data center, etc.)

Your security is needed first and foremost to you, not the provider. If the client itself transmits its data in an unencrypted form - the client's security policy, no one will configure it instead. It's as if you put the car in the parking lot, and not close it, and then make a complaint to the parking lot, they say, "why did not you follow my car." Of course, there are no “transcendental clouds”, or “ideal clouds” (according to Plato :), where the official’s hand cannot reach, there are clouds where it’s harder to do - yes.

One major auditor writes : Like any digital innovation, cloud storage offers profitable services, but their use is accompanied by the risk of becoming a victim of hackers. However, over time, security measures are being improved and the convenience of the “cloud” will calmly be addressed by ordinary users who do not worry about their collection of songs, and large companies for whom the preservation of files is paramount.
- so the fact is that any server can become a "victim of hackers" regardless of where it is located at your home, or in the data center cloud. Security must be always and everywhere, regardless of where and on what the infrastructure is built.

Lyrical digression
Very good, albeit ancient, cartoon-illustration about how often some ITshniki relate to security.


Germany is Germany


In some countries, law enforcement agencies, if they wish, can very easily block data not even at the request of the court, but simply “until clarification” of something, and the domestic data center will always obey even without a court decision, but simply by calling “from above”. Well, that's real: who in Germany will need a 1C base of a Russian / Ukrainian company? Very few people. In Germany, without a decision of the German court, even for the authorities, access to private information is simply impossible and illegal. And the German courts are extremely careful in such cases, and if we are not talking about terrorism, drugs and cyber crime, with sufficiently weighty evidence, they usually reject requests.

“Oh, this is a cloud - everything works by itself”
The fact is, the infrastructure needs to be built, no matter where it is located: at least on a physical server, at least in the cloud. Just in the case of the cloud, you get another "building" material for your IT architecture.

"And your admins, they will have access to our data?"

Of course not, unlike the admins in your backend who have the ability to pull out the disk and copy the data for some of their purposes. In the case of a cloud-based remote server, you do not have any personal relations with your administrator, which can deteriorate and you will not risk any sabotage by the (former) administrator. Employers often have the illusion that if a person is physically in their office, then they have full control over him, as an employee, and all (!) Levers of control. In the case of the provider, the company deals with another company and with a person who is not obliged to have any feelings for the client, he is responsible for the data and the service’s work - that's all, he does not receive a salary from the customer and is not a bottleneck with safety of customer data.

Our admins have no access to client data, and to the OS settings on its virtual machines. Only if the client himself decides to give access to his data, if he needs the help of our technical support.

There was a case when a customer quarreled with his admin, and the one who killed killed the entire database. The client requests to restore. We ask the customer: did you make backups? Logins, passwords to the database can provide? Customer: what is it? Thank God, it turned out to be FTP, which was copied to the database, and therefore managed to recover. Once again we say - your safety is your concern. For our part, on the part of the provider, we can guarantee that in our data center in Germany there is not and will not be physical access to your data. And already with your admin reconcile yourself, and best of all - do not quarrel with the admin - he is an important person! :)

"If in Germany - it will be long"

Our data centers in Germany are connected to the largest providers of the TIER1 level and thanks to direct channels from the Russian Federation and Ukraine, access to data from the territory of these countries is as fast as possible. For example, visitors will not notice the difference between loading a site hosted in our data center and hosted in Ukraine. , , , , - , .

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/308266/

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