{"id":38,"date":"2012-03-15T00:24:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T00:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/how-much-cloud-do-you-really-need"},"modified":"2012-03-15T00:24:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-15T00:24:00","slug":"how-much-cloud-do-you-really-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"How much cloud do you *really* need?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some stuff just makes us lazy.&nbsp; TV, instead of books.&nbsp; Cars, instead  of walking.&nbsp; The Cloud, instead of hosted servers.&nbsp; And often, when we  get lazy, we also get sloppy&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right.&nbsp; The cloud has  made us lazy.&nbsp; I can spin up a zillion machines as fast as I can click.&nbsp;  Make it absolutely great for prototyping, or cloning environments, or  QA&#8230; or some incredibly successful client-facing internet thingy that  goes from 100 users to a million overnight&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/9286a-cloud-scaled1000.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Cloud\" height=\"334\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/9286a-cloud-scaled1000.jpg?w=300\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But just because it&#8217;s the easiest tool for the job doesn&#8217;t make it the best tool for the job.<\/p>\n<p>And if you&#8217;ve had stuff in the cloud for a while, maybe it&#8217;s time for a quick review:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Have I changed the size of&nbsp; any of my instances in the last 6 months or a year?<\/li>\n<li>How about storage?&nbsp; What does my usage look like?<\/li>\n<li>How about network bandwidth and traffic?&nbsp; What does that look like?<\/li>\n<li>Am I sized &#8216;correctly&#8217; &#8211; even sensibly?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If  you&#8217;ve answered &#8216;no&#8217; to any of these questions, you&#8217;re probably paying  way too much for flexibility you don&#8217;t (and may never) need.<\/p>\n<p>I  have to admit, some cloud service providers are really getting on my  nerves.&nbsp; I hate being nickeled and dimed; S3 compatible storage @  $0.15\/gb is bad enough especially when I get charged another $0.15\/gb  for transport, but when you add extra for GETs and PUTs? <a href=\"http:\/\/connectria.com\">Connectria  (<a href=\"http:\/\/connectria.com\">http:\/\/connectria.com<\/a><\/a>) got it right by killing that charge.&nbsp; Just  yesterday I ran into a provider that&#8217;s charging $0.01 per hour per IP  address and $0.01 per hour per internet service, Oh Pleeeeasse!!<\/p>\n<p>Availability?&nbsp; Amazon has had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/news\/cloud-computing\/infrastructure\/229402520\"> a few issues<\/a>, and Microsoft Azure&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.datamation.com\/feature\/microsoft-to-credit-customers-for-azure-leap-day-bug.html\"> leap-day incompetence<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Of  course, I won&#8217;t mention security; and generally it&#8217;s been good  unless  you&#8217;ve been holding <a>bitcoins @ Linode<\/a>&#8230; still, hacking the  cloud  dashboard was a nice touch \ud83d\ude42 .<\/p>\n<p>Servers  are cheap.&nbsp; Virtual servers are even cheaper.&nbsp; So cheap that you could  run three of them in different parts of the country (or different  countries) and load-balance them.&nbsp; With a little bit of monitoring, you  can watch usage trends &#8211; and actually plan for what you&#8217;re going to  need.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, migrating all your crap off the cloud can be  non-trivial, time consuming and scary, and requires the sort of  specialized expertise the cloud takes care of implicitly.&nbsp; The reward is that you&#8217;re back in control.&nbsp; But it&#8217;s your data after all&#8230; and if all hell breaks loose in the cloud, all they&#8217;re gonna give you is an apology and a couple of days service credit&#8230; you&#8217;ve been warned.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder how long before YC12 sees a &#8216;cloudmover&#8217; startup?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Some stuff just makes us lazy. TV, instead of books. Cars, instead of walking. The Cloud, instead of hosted servers. And often, when we get lazy, we also get sloppy&#8230; That&#8217;s right. The cloud has made us lazy. I can spin up a zillion machines as f&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=38\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,5,7,12,26],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amazon","tag-azure","tag-cloud","tag-hosting","tag-s3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}