Posts by Nuff Said 42 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
One possible answer to the "what do we (humans) do now, now that computers are doing what we used to do?" question is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). It's sometimes suggested by the tech bros in an attempt to calm the fears of the masses. But UBI would need funding. Will the tech bros be willing to give up some/most of their billions to pay for it? Will they ****.
Everything you list:
- Design and manufacture their own servers?
- Create their own hypervisors, integrated into custom silicon?
- Run their own global fibre networks?
- Design custom electrical substations?
- Design their own CPUs?
- Design their own AI accelerator chips?
- Create their own distributed databases and analytics tools, heavily integrated into the infrastructure stack?
was being done before the cloud providers moved their tanks onto the government's lawn. If they disappeared tomorrow. it would still happen.
Just as in the pre-cloud days when hardware and software vendors tried to develop proprietary features to keep customers on their products, cloud providers are trying to differentiate themselves and *lock* customers in, which is what this is all about. It seems to be working at the moment and the concern is that the government can't get out, which is a perfect opportunity for the providers to jack prices up.
Running services on bog standard servers with open source software in either owned or third party co-locations would deliver value for money without lock-in. Sure, they wouldn't get access to the latest cutting edge features but for the vast majority of government services, that's not somewhere they ought to be playing.
How are the *vast majority* of government services "very lumpy"? Even the tax return service example you describe only needs to buffer them as they arrive. HMRC is at liberty to process them at a speed convenient to them.
(Public) cloud does have an advantage when there is a need to handle unpredictable and spiky workloads. But for running consistent workloads 24x7x365 days a year, you are just paying someone margin to run it on their servers in their data centre (although often a third party's, so extra margin) and it could be done cheaper if you did it yourself.
Trying to argue black is white just emphasises your blinkers here.
I work for a hardware vendor and everything you list in your first paragraph is instinctive for all my customers. If DHH hasn't considered this then he's not the bright chap pretty much *all* of his public comments suggest, and a massive outlier amongst his peers.
Secondly, most of these objections are handled by using a co-location data centre supplier rather than running your own. I see very few business who still own their own data centres apart from some (not all) of the largest multi-nationals. (See my final paragraph below as well). So objections like a UPS and generator are moot, as it's part of the service you are paying for. Added to which Cloud services are often run out of these third party DCs anyway.
I would also contest your argument that moving to the cloud removes a lot of corner cases that might bite you - yes, it removes some, but just introduces others. Otherwise why has SRE suddenly become a thing as the cloud has grown ?
"People didn't switch to cloud to save money, at least no one with any sense did" - seriously? More than half of my customers have, if not an "Everything Cloud" policy, at least a "Cloud First" mantra. The more aggressive/impatient/foolish ones are getting their fingers royally burnt and seeing costs go up by 50%+. IMHO it is a combination of short-term opex avoidance, the desire to be more "agile" and simply an attempt by board-level people to appear more "sexy" that is driving this rush away from on-prem.
Ultimately though this is about scale. It rarely makes sense for consumers of specialist resources to produce it themselves. Who generates their own electricity or owns their own dark fibre for telecoms? But there comes a point where it is cheaper to take over yourself, and this often brings accompanying benefits like greater control - you are no longer forced into your vendors service levels of small, medium or large, can choose when maintenance occurs, are able to cope with unusual edge-cases and so on. As you say, there is some additional responsibility to be inherited if you do this, but you pay your money and make your choice. A final caveat though - I work with large organisations who have the luxury of size to allow some redundancy in people and resources and economies of scale. I would agree that cloud makes a lot more sense for smaller businesses.
"Actually Brexit was built on stories of an EU wide armed forces" - in your head only I suspect.
Ask anyone who voted Brexit why, and the vast majority will say one or more of immigration, sovereignty or freedom from EU interference/regulation. I doubt they will be able to explain what they actually mean or back it up with facts, but those were by far the main drivers.
"If you don't like what was posted and disagree, then you have to post something yourself."
<fights urge to mention the Nazis and fails> No-one *has* to do anything on here.
Not everyone who reads, votes or even posts replies on here is as confident or eloquent as you clearly believe you are. Some readers will just be too busy, others will just have a general sense of disagreement. Some may have posted contradictory replies before, been flamed and found the process uncomfortable or worse. There are a myriad of reasons why people may down vote and they are all valid to the down voter. The alternative is to live in the "only positive feedback" world of Facebook and similar, which would be a real echo chamber.
I had a friend (well, neighbour I got along with) who was an ex-mechanic who would service our car for a reasonable cost in his free time. Then he got a PC to run some engine tuning software - when it went wrong he expected me to "have a look" (i.e. fix) it for free. Many people don't see work you do sitting at a desk as "real" work.
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