Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

... and actually on Thursday this week! Ok, here goes. I'm thankful for:

• Generous friends who prefer their shiny new iPads to a stodgy old Kindle.
• Friends, period.
• Colleen's continuing (if painfully slow) improvement in health.
• The git distributed version control system.
• A server that does us the favor of crashing half a year before we have to go live, warning us with its untimely demise that Amazon's cloud is unreliable. (Cue Phil Ochs' setting of "The Highwayman" here.)
• Tuna sashimi and caprese salad for two for under $20 via Trader Joe's, and a quick dinner that didn't involve any cooking.

Comments

[saffronrose.livejournal.com]

If only they offered Hamachi sashimi to eat with my caprese or (WFoods) tabbouli salad, I would be extremely happy.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; it's hard to find good sashimi.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Gee, a cloud that's unreliable... color me unsurprised. It does surprise me slightly that Amazon proved unreliable, but they've probably been penny-pinching, and outside clients will take it in the shorts first before their core business will. Hint: their core business isn't "cloud" services.

People who bet their business on the cloud are fools, IMO. Cloud "strategies" should only be one of a multi-level redundancy plan. This makes me a heretic in today's cloud drunk world. But cloud services don't even have decent SLAs like traditional hosting does - and that's all the "cloud" is - virtualized hosting broken up into segments and oversold.

But all the whiz kids, marketing hipsters, and cowboy sysadmins in the valley are convinced. I say "Sure, keep your 'live' backups in the cloud, encrypted or secured, but keep tape (or spare drive) copies of your source repository, database, and essential configs off-site anyway."

But what do I know, right?

[mdlbear]

Looks like we're switching to Rackspace. Who at least don't wrap their virtual servers and NAS boxes up in layers of mumbo-jumbo, wacko packet routing, and nonstandard interfaces. And who ive you a virtual serial console to use if things go wonky.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Good. But have a tertiary option too. Seriously, trusting the "cloud" is just asking for a kick in the teeth.

Amazon's infrastructure is set up for Amazon's core business, not cloud hosting, and a lot of it is homegrown and organic. It wasn't designed as a hosting platform.

Rackspace is a hosting provider, from the start, and it's their main business. Amazon S3, etc is a way for them to make some spare cash from extra capacity.

[mdlbear]

Yup. I understand the really mission-critical stuff is going onto an in-house datacenter. We need hosting to handle the load, but the _real_ data stays inside.