How an IT executive can achieve the desired goal of cloud services

While the industry boasts that cloud services can save costs, the reality is not as good for Ernie Neuman as it is not because there is no real cost savings, but because the use of the service is out of control.

Prior to 2.5, Neuman also worked for the IT department in the Seattle Cole & weberhttp://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/6277.html "> Advertising company." He got cloud services from a provider named Tier3, but then had to give up halfway because the cost quickly overtook the budget, which he called the bad result of cloud services (cloud sprawl): Developers randomly create virtual servers, discard them, use other servers, Without shutting down servers that are no longer needed, the resulting virtual server has increased dramatically and lost control.

Although Neuman expects the developer to use up to 25 virtual servers, the actual number of users has reached about 70. "Costs are running out of control compared to the company's original planned expenditure," he said. ”

He tried to change the policy of using virtual servers so that virtual servers could be used only from 7 o'clock in the morning to 7 o'clock. However, due to the inevitable progress of the project and to meet the deadline, it is bound to violate the new policy, this move will not work.

Finally, the company built its own VMware Cloud environment, supporting up to 100 virtual servers.

Later, Neumann to a big Fish games, which developed computer games and online games, as it director, who tried the cloud service again in the company, but came across a similar result.

Big Fish hired Amazon's server capacity to launch a pilot-phase Facebook game. "The game was a big success later," he said. The game is good in a cloud environment because it can be expanded quickly, but the cost is out of control. ”

Instead, he removed the content from the cloud and put the game inside the company, which he said had worked three months later: it saved costs by not having to pay for cloud services. "It's not a performance issue that drives this change," he says, "but this experience has made him a little tired of cloud services." "Now we are disgusted with cloud services; we don't even talk about cloud services at ordinary times." ”

He said that unless a project launched by Big Fish would benefit from cloud services, it would no longer use cloud services.

As early as Neuman was still at Cole & Weber, a different problem had been encountered at the cloud provider, Teremark (now Wellison), which was largely due to the rapid development of a relatively short service provider and the inability to effectively manage cloud services. As a result, the advertising agency put all the SQL systems deployed on the physical servers within the company, and the SQL system was virtualized in the Teremark cloud environment.

Other lessons he learned included the need to read the service level agreement (SLA) carefully because he found that some of the people he met did not read the SLA carefully. He said: "You may have encountered a serious outage, but by SLA terms, it may be within the scope of the grant." "If the provider provides 99% uptime, this is equivalent to 7.5 hours of downtime per month." "It's been a whole day," he said.

In general, he is skeptical about cloud services security, and he has not really scrutinized cloud services. "I think cloud services are inherently unsafe because I can't control it," he said. ”

For example, providers say they are in line with SAS 70 standards for cyber defenses, but Neuman is worried about the threat from the provider's employees. "Like every other company, the biggest threat to the provider comes from within," he said. ”

Unless a reliable cloud security standard is in place, he avoids putting critical applications in the cloud unless he carefully examines the security of the provider. "I almost had to know all the aspects of what the providers were doing," he said. ”

Even so, there are uncertainties. For example, if the data is placed in a data center, but the provider expands the scale, or the data is replicated to another datacenter in the cloud provider's network, how does the other person know that the second site is as secure?

Neuman says his provider Tier 3, which is used to deploy SQL virtual systems, has done a good job of explaining and ensuring security, but is still asking customers to shoulder some of the blame. "The other person's position is that you need to take the necessary steps yourself," he said. ”

He says IT departments are trying to be as flexible as possible to support projects, but the reality is that the cost of cloud services is hard to predict accurately. "The cost of cloud services is actually an unknown factor," he said. If you're going to spend six months on the same cost as buying physical hardware, you have to go the other way. ”

(editor: Heritage)