Twisted in the clouds: prospects for development and the reverse side of cloud-services
The new year is getting closer, which means the most fertile time for a variety of forecasts. Initially, we planned to cover several aspects of the IT industry at once, but considering how voluminous the article began to turn out, as well as the invisible sword of Damocles, which had recently hung over many industries, we decided to make a more specialized material. Today we will talk about the clouds, about what development prospects are expected in the near future by numerous cloud-services, and also about the fact that no one technology should be fully relied upon.
On April 12, 2018, the analytical agency Gartner published the results of a study of the development of the cloud services market. According to the cited data, the costs for cloud platforms have increased by more than 30% over the past two years, with the lion's share of costs falling on software delivered in service (SaaS) format and infrastructure services (IaaS), and the total costs of commercial enterprises and private clouds on public clouds amounted to 153.5 billion dollars against 118 billion in 2016.
If the IaaS segment grew by 4.7 billion dollars, then SaaS increased by as much as 21.6 billion. PaaS solutions (business platform as a service) also demonstrated high percentage results, “gaining weight” by 4.7 billion with a total capitalization of 7.2 billion dollars as of 2016. The cost of BPaaS services (business process automation solutions) and cloud management services for security systems also increased, reaching 42.6 and 8.7 billion, respectively.
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According to analysts Gartner, in the coming years, the popularity of clouds will continue to grow, and the leading position will continue to remain for SaaS: by 2021, this segment will have 45% of global software spending. The most dynamic sector of the market is IaaS, which demonstrated a 40% growth this year.
Researchers at Cisco predict a no less brilliant future for cloud services. At the beginning of the year, the corporation published the traditional report Cisco Global Cloud Index 2016-2021 (“Global Cloud Development Index in the Period from 2016 to 2021”), in which it noted the dominance of cloud-services on the Internet, helped by the increased popularity of consumer services, so and business applications. In the latter case, corporate resource management (ERP) solutions, analytics systems and collaboration platforms are developing most intensively.
As a result, in the coming years, a significant increase in multi-cloud traffic is expected: as early as 2021, the turnover of information in the data center servicing cloud-based services promises to grow 3.3 times, reaching 19.5 zetabytes (for comparison, in 2016 this figure was only 6 zetas ), while the total cloud traffic will reach almost 95% of the world. The reaction to increased loads will be quite natural: the number of hyper-scale public data centers will continue to increase and in only three years it will almost double (628 versus 338 at present). Thus, by 2021, the share of hyper-scale data centers will account for 70% of all computing power.
The main drivers of such rapid growth are the spread of IoT (for example, if now the number of IoT connections is about 5.8 billion, in three years this figure will reach 13.7 billion), the further development of the concept of smart cities, the introduction of modern technologies in such industries as energy and health. In addition, the growth of cloud traffic is influenced by innovations in the field of information security and low cost of cloud services, which is determined by the economies of scale effect. According to Cisco experts, all of the above will lead to the fact that by 2021 the cloud market will approach the following indicators:
The concerns expressed by the expert are understandable, but Sid Nag did not take into account that the danger lies not only in possible abuses by the holders of the services.
The main event of the spring of 2018 can be called the massive blocking of various Internet services in Russia in an attempt to restrict access to Telegrams. Recall that on April 13, 2018, the Tagansky Court of Moscow issued a decision in favor of Roskomnadzor, deciding to block a popular messenger in the Russian Federation. The most unpleasant in this situation were not the outcome of the trial, but the negative consequences caused by the ill-considered actions of the ILV workers. Already on April 16 (that is, three days after the verdict was issued, taking into account the weekend), about 2 million IP addresses of the AWS cloud service, over 1 million Google addresses and 130 thousand IP addresses of the Microsoft Azure cloud service went to the blacklist. Then, the distribution included data centers belonging to a number of foreign hosting providers, including Digital Ocean (196.5 thousand addresses), Hetzner (65.5 thousand addresses), Iliad Datacenter (32.7 thousand addresses), Online. net (65.5 thousand addresses) and Clouding.io (510 addresses). And on April 18, the ILV got a taste: a total of nearly 20 million IP addresses were in emergency situations. The dynamics of locks can be tracked in the following graph.
Mass blocking in an attempt to restrict access to Telegram
Starting April 16, 2018, users began to notice interruptions in the network services provided by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. In addition, we suffered from blockages:
Locks have also affected many Russian commercial enterprises. So, for example, city stations of bicycle rental in St. Petersburg, belonging to the company “Velogorod”, were out of order, because the ability to remotely manage the infrastructure was lost due to the unavailability of cloud services. For the same reason, there were interruptions in the operation of the cash registers of the Dixy grocery stores and Sheremetyevo airport check-in systems. Even Ivideon, which provides cloud video surveillance services, with Rosneft, Megafon and DHL among its customers, has been hit.
Only on April 28, that is, 13 days after the Internet blackout, Roskomnadzor realized that it was slightly overdone in the fight against windmills: on this day more than 3 million addresses belonging to OVH and Amazon disappeared from the registry, and the ministry issued an official statement which promised to gradually unblock subnets and other providers, so as not to impede the work of respectable resources. The promise was fulfilled: the first was followed by a number of other unlocks, the amnesty of June 8 was one of the largest, when more than 7 million Amazon IPs and the German provider A100 ROW Inc. disappeared from the black list. At the moment, about 3,685,650 addresses remain in the Blacklist.
Dynamics of IP address blocking by Roskomnadzor
This situation has clearly demonstrated that with all the convenience of cloud services are very vulnerable. One day, trying to access files stored on a remote server, you may be confronted with the fact that you cannot physically do this for reasons beyond the control of you or the provider. And although we are all well aware of the existence of means to bypass any blocking, and many even have personal VPNs in case of unforeseen circumstances, their use requires additional monetary costs, sometimes very substantial ones when it comes to the need to transfer tens and hundreds of gigabytes of information. Therefore, when Pavel Durov declared that the quality of life of 15 million Russians would deteriorate, he was fundamentally wrong: the events of April 16, 2018 affected much more people, and the reason for this lies not in the blocking of one of the dozens of existing messengers.
And you shouldn’t expect that the Telegram fiasco will cost the RKN billions in losses and the federal unit will henceforth act more carefully. On August 6, the Tagansky Court of Moscow rejected the claim to the department for 500 thousand rubles from Live Photography, and on August 29, the same fate befell the Investori claim , which wished to compensate for the losses in the amount of 5 million rubles. In this case, the most interesting is the position of lawyers of Roskomnadzor. The lawyer said that there is no convincing evidence of massive blockages, which have resulted in serious financial losses for many enterprises, they are known only from the media. And although there is no case law in Russia, it can already be assumed that a similar fate will befall all other statements of claim, no matter what the efforts of the advocates of the affected parties. So, at any time the blackout can happen again.
However, the desire to globally regulate the Internet is characteristic not only for Russia. The European Parliament and the EU Council are actively discussing the principles of content filtering by various online services. The formulations included in the EU copyright directive are so broad that absolutely any project can go under them, from video hosting or cloud storage, to Github and even Wikipedia. This is a timely identification of copyrighted materials, but the question is, how do lawmakers intend to separate the wheat from the chaff? For example, if you want to additionally secure your game store consisting of GOG installers deprived of DRM, or to upload to the cloud backup copies of music files taken from a completely acquired CD by CD, would this be considered a violation? Not to mention the fact that the introduction of mandatory content filtering will require additional costs from providers, which will necessarily affect tariffs.
Global hysteria with the protection of personal information also imposes a negative imprint on the IT industry. In Russia, the relevant law directly prescribes hosting servers with databases in the territory of the Russian Federation, which placed an additional burden on small business representatives. The European GDPR was no better in this respect: excess infrastructure requirements coupled with the bureaucratization of cross-border data transmission questioned the existence of small companies. The first victim of the new law was Loadout online shooter.
Network shooter Loadout, developed by Edge of Reality
On May 8, the Edge of Reality announced the closure of the project due to the fact that the GDPR was too heavy for a small studio that had previously experienced financial problems. The last straw was the fact that the cloud provider, with whom the developers collaborated, eliminated a number of important functions that did not comply with the new legislation, without which the game servers could not work, and the cost of completely rewriting the network code was too high.
However, all this is quite natural and expected. After all, trade wars are not only reciprocal import duties in the United States and China. State confrontations are constantly going on, and any law, if the context allows, will somehow carry protectionist measures. Often, no one takes into account either the specifics of a particular technology or the interests of industry participants, and in the case of clouds, this approach can be fatal for business.
If you look at the problem soberly, you can make a fairly simple and obvious conclusion: cloud-services have spoiled not only individuals, but also business representatives. Yes, storing data in the clouds, using them for information processing and even creating a security infrastructure is really convenient, and most importantly - beneficial. But at the same time you become hostage to the situation: if the abuse from the providers themselves is the exception rather than the rule (any commercial enterprise values ​​its own reputation), then the actions of third parties can suddenly deprive you of everything that you have been used to and successfully used for years.
Therefore, today information assets can be protected and confidence can be gained in the future in only one way: by investing in our own IT infrastructure. Yes, costs will increase, but at the same time, at least, the risk of getting blacklisted by a particular state simply because your IP was used to proxy the traffic of several more clients, will be minimized.
In this regard, small business representatives are simpler: more modest needs in computing power are determined by the low costs of creating their own IT infrastructure. And ordinary users can resort to ready-made solutions, such as storage from the My Cloud Pro series.
My Cloud Pro PR2100
Consider the advantages of this approach on the example of the model WD My Cloud PR2100. The device has two compartments for SATA-drives: thus, installing a pair of flagship WD Red drives, you will have at your disposal a NAS with a maximum capacity of 20 terabytes (or 10 terabytes when creating a RAID-1 array). The platform is based on a quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 processor, whose SDP does not exceed 4 watts - thanks to the use of passive cooling, the device turned out to be truly quiet. On the system board soldered 4 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM operating in dual channel mode at a frequency of 1600 MHz. The possibility of expanding the RAM is not provided, but the available capacity is more than enough for almost every day tasks, including hardware transcoding of H.264 and H.265 streams in formats up to 4k30 and 4k60.
Yes, you heard right - this feature is provided in all models of the line, which further expands the scope of NAS. For example, hardware video transcoding is useful for those who wish to turn file storage into a full-fledged multimedia server by installing the popular Plex solution.
Plex Media Server
Such an opportunity will appeal to not only film fans, but also professional content makers (journalists, photographers, operators, musicians): the application will help you effectively organize a library of images, audio recordings and video clips that can be played on almost any device, because for Plex there is client software for all modern operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS), and in addition, it supports most current Smart-TV models.
The possibilities of WD My Cloud PR2100 are not limited to this. For example, file storage can be turned into a web server by installing CMS Joomla, Wordpress or phpBB, used to store a backup of the corporate MySQL database, upload and upload files using Transmission or aMule, and the ability to synchronize with DropBox will make it easier to move from public clouds in personal.
However, we were distracted, because the main task of the cloud NAS is to ensure the possibility of sharing files between various devices and storing them. Western Digital has developed a number of application utilities for this purpose. So, using WD Access, you can check the status of the drive, connect shared folders, or send the necessary files to one or another device. WD SmartWare Pro can back up data stored on a PC running Windows, but owners of Mac computers can use the regular Apple Time Machine application for this purpose. WD Sync , . , My Cloud , — , , .
, - Western Digital ( , , ), , , SMB, NFS, AFP, FTP WebDAV. , My Cloud OS 3 : , FTP , , FXP, . , My Cloud Pro, - , .
, : , , , . CDN, -, , IT-. , , . , , , .
On April 12, 2018, the analytical agency Gartner published the results of a study of the development of the cloud services market. According to the cited data, the costs for cloud platforms have increased by more than 30% over the past two years, with the lion's share of costs falling on software delivered in service (SaaS) format and infrastructure services (IaaS), and the total costs of commercial enterprises and private clouds on public clouds amounted to 153.5 billion dollars against 118 billion in 2016.
If the IaaS segment grew by 4.7 billion dollars, then SaaS increased by as much as 21.6 billion. PaaS solutions (business platform as a service) also demonstrated high percentage results, “gaining weight” by 4.7 billion with a total capitalization of 7.2 billion dollars as of 2016. The cost of BPaaS services (business process automation solutions) and cloud management services for security systems also increased, reaching 42.6 and 8.7 billion, respectively.
')
According to analysts Gartner, in the coming years, the popularity of clouds will continue to grow, and the leading position will continue to remain for SaaS: by 2021, this segment will have 45% of global software spending. The most dynamic sector of the market is IaaS, which demonstrated a 40% growth this year.
Researchers at Cisco predict a no less brilliant future for cloud services. At the beginning of the year, the corporation published the traditional report Cisco Global Cloud Index 2016-2021 (“Global Cloud Development Index in the Period from 2016 to 2021”), in which it noted the dominance of cloud-services on the Internet, helped by the increased popularity of consumer services, so and business applications. In the latter case, corporate resource management (ERP) solutions, analytics systems and collaboration platforms are developing most intensively.
As a result, in the coming years, a significant increase in multi-cloud traffic is expected: as early as 2021, the turnover of information in the data center servicing cloud-based services promises to grow 3.3 times, reaching 19.5 zetabytes (for comparison, in 2016 this figure was only 6 zetas ), while the total cloud traffic will reach almost 95% of the world. The reaction to increased loads will be quite natural: the number of hyper-scale public data centers will continue to increase and in only three years it will almost double (628 versus 338 at present). Thus, by 2021, the share of hyper-scale data centers will account for 70% of all computing power.
The main drivers of such rapid growth are the spread of IoT (for example, if now the number of IoT connections is about 5.8 billion, in three years this figure will reach 13.7 billion), the further development of the concept of smart cities, the introduction of modern technologies in such industries as energy and health. In addition, the growth of cloud traffic is influenced by innovations in the field of information security and low cost of cloud services, which is determined by the economies of scale effect. According to Cisco experts, all of the above will lead to the fact that by 2021 the cloud market will approach the following indicators:
- 94% of the tasks facing the business will be solved at the expense of cloud data centers, whereas traditional data centers will have a share of only 6% of the calculations;
- the global amount of stored data in the data center will increase by 4.6 times, with 30% of them will be Big Data;
- thanks to the development of the Internet of things, the total amount of generated data will be two orders of magnitude higher than the amount of stored information and will amount to 837 zeb.
“Such a development is quite natural,” said Sart Nag, director of cloud services research at Gartner. - Following the current trends, the business seeks to find the easiest and cheapest way to create a new IT infrastructure and redistribute workloads from the existing one. In this sense, SaaS and IaaS are really out of competition, opening up virtually unlimited possibilities for market participants. However, going into the clouds is fraught with a lot of dangers: in the end, there may be a situation where providers will have an almost uncontrollable influence on both the customers and the market as a whole.
The concerns expressed by the expert are understandable, but Sid Nag did not take into account that the danger lies not only in possible abuses by the holders of the services.
Mass blocking course
The main event of the spring of 2018 can be called the massive blocking of various Internet services in Russia in an attempt to restrict access to Telegrams. Recall that on April 13, 2018, the Tagansky Court of Moscow issued a decision in favor of Roskomnadzor, deciding to block a popular messenger in the Russian Federation. The most unpleasant in this situation were not the outcome of the trial, but the negative consequences caused by the ill-considered actions of the ILV workers. Already on April 16 (that is, three days after the verdict was issued, taking into account the weekend), about 2 million IP addresses of the AWS cloud service, over 1 million Google addresses and 130 thousand IP addresses of the Microsoft Azure cloud service went to the blacklist. Then, the distribution included data centers belonging to a number of foreign hosting providers, including Digital Ocean (196.5 thousand addresses), Hetzner (65.5 thousand addresses), Iliad Datacenter (32.7 thousand addresses), Online. net (65.5 thousand addresses) and Clouding.io (510 addresses). And on April 18, the ILV got a taste: a total of nearly 20 million IP addresses were in emergency situations. The dynamics of locks can be tracked in the following graph.
Mass blocking in an attempt to restrict access to Telegram
Starting April 16, 2018, users began to notice interruptions in the network services provided by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. In addition, we suffered from blockages:
- Viber and WhatsApp messengers
- Social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Twitter
- Payment systems Mastercard, Cloudpayments
- PlayStation Network and Xbox Live gaming services, Nintendo Switch Store, Battle.Net platform, owned by Activision Blizzard
- A number of online media (in particular, the website of the radio station "Govorit Moscow", the publication of "Life hacker", Ruptly - video agency Russia Today channel)
- Spotify streaming service
- Evernote Notes Service
- Online stores and sites using reCaptcha (unavailability of the service made it impossible to register and authorize users)
- Skyeng online English school
- Online games Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, Eve Online, and others
- Tezis Investment Platform
Locks have also affected many Russian commercial enterprises. So, for example, city stations of bicycle rental in St. Petersburg, belonging to the company “Velogorod”, were out of order, because the ability to remotely manage the infrastructure was lost due to the unavailability of cloud services. For the same reason, there were interruptions in the operation of the cash registers of the Dixy grocery stores and Sheremetyevo airport check-in systems. Even Ivideon, which provides cloud video surveillance services, with Rosneft, Megafon and DHL among its customers, has been hit.
Only on April 28, that is, 13 days after the Internet blackout, Roskomnadzor realized that it was slightly overdone in the fight against windmills: on this day more than 3 million addresses belonging to OVH and Amazon disappeared from the registry, and the ministry issued an official statement which promised to gradually unblock subnets and other providers, so as not to impede the work of respectable resources. The promise was fulfilled: the first was followed by a number of other unlocks, the amnesty of June 8 was one of the largest, when more than 7 million Amazon IPs and the German provider A100 ROW Inc. disappeared from the black list. At the moment, about 3,685,650 addresses remain in the Blacklist.
Dynamics of IP address blocking by Roskomnadzor
This situation has clearly demonstrated that with all the convenience of cloud services are very vulnerable. One day, trying to access files stored on a remote server, you may be confronted with the fact that you cannot physically do this for reasons beyond the control of you or the provider. And although we are all well aware of the existence of means to bypass any blocking, and many even have personal VPNs in case of unforeseen circumstances, their use requires additional monetary costs, sometimes very substantial ones when it comes to the need to transfer tens and hundreds of gigabytes of information. Therefore, when Pavel Durov declared that the quality of life of 15 million Russians would deteriorate, he was fundamentally wrong: the events of April 16, 2018 affected much more people, and the reason for this lies not in the blocking of one of the dozens of existing messengers.
And you shouldn’t expect that the Telegram fiasco will cost the RKN billions in losses and the federal unit will henceforth act more carefully. On August 6, the Tagansky Court of Moscow rejected the claim to the department for 500 thousand rubles from Live Photography, and on August 29, the same fate befell the Investori claim , which wished to compensate for the losses in the amount of 5 million rubles. In this case, the most interesting is the position of lawyers of Roskomnadzor. The lawyer said that there is no convincing evidence of massive blockages, which have resulted in serious financial losses for many enterprises, they are known only from the media. And although there is no case law in Russia, it can already be assumed that a similar fate will befall all other statements of claim, no matter what the efforts of the advocates of the affected parties. So, at any time the blackout can happen again.
However, the desire to globally regulate the Internet is characteristic not only for Russia. The European Parliament and the EU Council are actively discussing the principles of content filtering by various online services. The formulations included in the EU copyright directive are so broad that absolutely any project can go under them, from video hosting or cloud storage, to Github and even Wikipedia. This is a timely identification of copyrighted materials, but the question is, how do lawmakers intend to separate the wheat from the chaff? For example, if you want to additionally secure your game store consisting of GOG installers deprived of DRM, or to upload to the cloud backup copies of music files taken from a completely acquired CD by CD, would this be considered a violation? Not to mention the fact that the introduction of mandatory content filtering will require additional costs from providers, which will necessarily affect tariffs.
Global hysteria with the protection of personal information also imposes a negative imprint on the IT industry. In Russia, the relevant law directly prescribes hosting servers with databases in the territory of the Russian Federation, which placed an additional burden on small business representatives. The European GDPR was no better in this respect: excess infrastructure requirements coupled with the bureaucratization of cross-border data transmission questioned the existence of small companies. The first victim of the new law was Loadout online shooter.
Network shooter Loadout, developed by Edge of Reality
On May 8, the Edge of Reality announced the closure of the project due to the fact that the GDPR was too heavy for a small studio that had previously experienced financial problems. The last straw was the fact that the cloud provider, with whom the developers collaborated, eliminated a number of important functions that did not comply with the new legislation, without which the game servers could not work, and the cost of completely rewriting the network code was too high.
However, all this is quite natural and expected. After all, trade wars are not only reciprocal import duties in the United States and China. State confrontations are constantly going on, and any law, if the context allows, will somehow carry protectionist measures. Often, no one takes into account either the specifics of a particular technology or the interests of industry participants, and in the case of clouds, this approach can be fatal for business.
A cloud that no one can take from you
If you look at the problem soberly, you can make a fairly simple and obvious conclusion: cloud-services have spoiled not only individuals, but also business representatives. Yes, storing data in the clouds, using them for information processing and even creating a security infrastructure is really convenient, and most importantly - beneficial. But at the same time you become hostage to the situation: if the abuse from the providers themselves is the exception rather than the rule (any commercial enterprise values ​​its own reputation), then the actions of third parties can suddenly deprive you of everything that you have been used to and successfully used for years.
Therefore, today information assets can be protected and confidence can be gained in the future in only one way: by investing in our own IT infrastructure. Yes, costs will increase, but at the same time, at least, the risk of getting blacklisted by a particular state simply because your IP was used to proxy the traffic of several more clients, will be minimized.
In this regard, small business representatives are simpler: more modest needs in computing power are determined by the low costs of creating their own IT infrastructure. And ordinary users can resort to ready-made solutions, such as storage from the My Cloud Pro series.
My Cloud Pro PR2100
Consider the advantages of this approach on the example of the model WD My Cloud PR2100. The device has two compartments for SATA-drives: thus, installing a pair of flagship WD Red drives, you will have at your disposal a NAS with a maximum capacity of 20 terabytes (or 10 terabytes when creating a RAID-1 array). The platform is based on a quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 processor, whose SDP does not exceed 4 watts - thanks to the use of passive cooling, the device turned out to be truly quiet. On the system board soldered 4 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM operating in dual channel mode at a frequency of 1600 MHz. The possibility of expanding the RAM is not provided, but the available capacity is more than enough for almost every day tasks, including hardware transcoding of H.264 and H.265 streams in formats up to 4k30 and 4k60.
Yes, you heard right - this feature is provided in all models of the line, which further expands the scope of NAS. For example, hardware video transcoding is useful for those who wish to turn file storage into a full-fledged multimedia server by installing the popular Plex solution.
Plex Media Server
Such an opportunity will appeal to not only film fans, but also professional content makers (journalists, photographers, operators, musicians): the application will help you effectively organize a library of images, audio recordings and video clips that can be played on almost any device, because for Plex there is client software for all modern operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS), and in addition, it supports most current Smart-TV models.
The possibilities of WD My Cloud PR2100 are not limited to this. For example, file storage can be turned into a web server by installing CMS Joomla, Wordpress or phpBB, used to store a backup of the corporate MySQL database, upload and upload files using Transmission or aMule, and the ability to synchronize with DropBox will make it easier to move from public clouds in personal.
However, we were distracted, because the main task of the cloud NAS is to ensure the possibility of sharing files between various devices and storing them. Western Digital has developed a number of application utilities for this purpose. So, using WD Access, you can check the status of the drive, connect shared folders, or send the necessary files to one or another device. WD SmartWare Pro can back up data stored on a PC running Windows, but owners of Mac computers can use the regular Apple Time Machine application for this purpose. WD Sync , . , My Cloud , — , , .
, - Western Digital ( , , ), , , SMB, NFS, AFP, FTP WebDAV. , My Cloud OS 3 : , FTP , , FXP, . , My Cloud Pro, - , .
, : , , , . CDN, -, , IT-. , , . , , , .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/432734/
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