Author Topic: Proof that software as service/cloud based, will never work for long term ...  (Read 93825 times)

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Offline Halcyon

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I can see businesses (and individuals) turning their backs on the whole "cloud" model as instances increase of companies just turning their backs on customers, going bust, being bought out, discontinuing products etc... If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up. This is just the modern-day equivalent of software which phones home just to run, install or activate or relies on a physical dongle with a time restriction.

Consumers are slowly realising that they have lost control (and in some cases, ownership) of their data and software purchases. For example, I switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice the moment I needed any sort of online account just to type a letter or activate the software.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2019, 10:03:32 am by Halcyon »
 
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Offline Brumby

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If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up.
I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.
 
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Offline daqq

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I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.
There are things that I use it for - as a backup solution and a sync between computers it simplifies things... but is not critical and can easily be replaced should the company in question go belly up. I don't mind cloud applications that by definition need a cloud, such as syncing devices, offsite storage and similar. But a professional application to be cloud and cloud only and need to call home every week or so to ? No thanks.
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Offline BravoVTopic starter

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But a professional application to be cloud and cloud only and need to call home every week or so to ? No thanks.

Btw, even worst, your OS.

For example Windows 10  -> Windows 10 users fume: Microsoft, where's our 'local account' option gone?  :palm:

Its starting and it seems like Microsoft is testing the ground of acceptance, slowly.

There is no way I will surrender the local admin account, this means only one thing, surrender your ownership, power and control over your own computer.

Its easy to imagine one day, you turned on your computer and suddenly your OS tells you that you are no longer can use your computer, access your files and all are locked, just because a dude which happened to be another country's leader said so.  :wtf: :rant:
 
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Online Sal Ammoniac

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Gives me more control and I'm not at the mercy of anyone when it comes to things like repairs or improvements etc nor do I need to worry about being evicted for any reason.  (ex: they want to tear it down)

Canada doesn't have something similar to the U.S. concept of eminent domain?
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Ownership is good, but is only a partial/weak solution.  I have any number of useful programs from the 90s that won't run under current OS.  So I have to maintain an old OS.  If hardware fails under them I am then trying to re-install old OS, but activation mechanism may not exist any longer.  So far I have been able to keep most of them alive, but it continues to get harder and harder.
 

Offline bd139

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Uninstalled Fusion 360. Back to FreeCAD.

If you think this is all bad consider someone like Amazon. You build your product on their equipment with their services. There is no escape the moment you pull that first non IaaS component in.
 

Offline hendorog

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Uninstalled Fusion 360. Back to FreeCAD.

If you think this is all bad consider someone like Amazon. You build your product on their equipment with their services. There is no escape the moment you pull that first non IaaS component in.

No escape _without some porting effort_

Which is the same as it has always been. Round and round we go.
 

Offline bd139

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I know someone who tried to port their stuff away from just S3 due to escalating costs. Not as easy as it looks. Things like Redshift are even worse. Then there’s the predatory SQL server pricing on Azure vs AWS for example.

I only recommend fully portable IaaS.

Watch this space. Literally I’m betting my future on “unclouding” businesses.  :-DD
« Last Edit: October 09, 2019, 07:03:25 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline hendorog

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I know someone who tried to port their stuff away from just S3 due to escalating costs. Not as easy as it looks. Things like Redshift are even worse.

Yep -some services will be harder than others, and costs will vary. I could take your exact sentence and replace S3 with Oracle or IBM Message Broker or Websphere or DB2 or an AS/400 or Microsoft Exchange, and it would be just as true.

The point is that right now there are plenty of similar enough cloud services out there, and also on premise options. If the decision is made to shift either onto a cloud service, or off, then consideration to the costs and practicalities should be given.



 

Offline Rick Law

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I always buy full licenses. I just don't feel comfortable to have essentially my money controlled by someone else, and something bas simple as a network outage bricks my software.

Note that you could also be screwed with full licenses if the software uses some kind of online activation. If a regular check is required by your particular software, and the server gets permanently unaccessible, you could get eventually "kicked out".

Full version/license doesn't always help.  They have ways and that is what killed my Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 software.  At over $1K, it was a lot to spend for a hobby but I had a lot of baby videos to edit and wanted to make them well, so I got full feature version and with full license, phone activated with a key and all that.

Each time I swap disc or memory, it asked for reactivation.  I use the key code and all is well.

One day, it asked me to re-activate, probably acted on some date-driven parameter.  So, I reentered the key code.  This time, the same key code no longer work and force an on-line re-activation.  The on-line reactivation URL no longer function, the phone number no longer worked...  I called the main number... so on so on and each time they just suggest I should buy another full license for the latest version.  All my edited segment stored in the V1.5 format was lost.  I later found a way to use the "trial mode" to run the old version for a limited time to export.  By then, I totally lost my confidence and interest in Adobe products.

Another video package from a different company of the same era (Visual Communicator) ran into a similar but different issue.  One day, the fully licensed and activated software displays a "I am expired - reactivation required" message.  I followed the link, download the upgrade, paid for a new key code for the newer version (V2, if I recalled correctly).  Ok, the new install said it can't until after I delete V1 and say "click OK to delete".  So I did, and it begin the V2 install - one screen later, it said "it can't upgrade because I don't have an activated V1 on the system to upgrade"...  Again, phone call loop that went no where...  I ended up without a working version of V1 or V2.

I came to think of on-line activation as evil.

The last time I purchased a package requiring activation, I paid in full and then went on line to find a crack.  I have the full menu, the full set of DVD, but I run the cracked version instead.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2019, 07:25:34 pm by Rick Law »
 
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Offline windsmurf

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If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up.
I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.

Welcome to EEVBLOG Forums, a Cloud-based service.
 
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Offline dferyance

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I know someone who tried to port their stuff away from just S3 due to escalating costs. Not as easy as it looks. Things like Redshift are even worse.

One particular challenge with AWS and other cloud services is they make it very easy and enticing to adopt more and more of their services. Projects often end up with ties to a large number of vendor-specific services. This is even worse with microservice architectures in that each microservice team will adopt whatever services they like. You no longer have the problem of being tied to a vendor-specific service, but that you are tied to all of the vendor-specific services. I've even seen the split where some teams were using GCP and some were AWS. So we were tied to all of multiple vendor's services.
 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Yep -some services will be harder than others, and costs will vary. I could take your exact sentence and replace S3 with Oracle or IBM Message Broker or Websphere or DB2 or an AS/400 or Microsoft Exchange, and it would be just as true.

The point is that right now there are plenty of similar enough cloud services out there, and also on premise options. If the decision is made to shift either onto a cloud service, or off, then consideration to the costs and practicalities should be given.
The problem is that the cost of cloud services is often delayed or hidden and you're up to your neck when you finally figure it out. The up front cost of traditional setups is what makes the cloud stuff look interesting.
 
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Offline Halcyon

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If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up.
I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.

Welcome to EEVBLOG Forums, a Cloud-based service.

Sure, however if the forum closed tomorrow, we can all go about our work and personal lives without a problem. It wouldn't have a "critical" impact on anyone. The internet is transient, hell even before the internet, BBSs would open up, close down etc...

Personally, for all things storage/backup/syncing, I use a completely self-hosted solution. Yes, it involves an initial cost in building servers and infrastructure, but even when the internet is out (which in Australia is transient itself thanks to the NBN), I have full and complete access to everything including the movies and TV shows I enjoy watching.

Once I upgrade the memory in one of my servers this weekend, I will be building my own "cloud" solution based on NextCloud so I'll essentially have my own version of Google G-Suite except where I have complete control of the data.

 

Offline hendorog

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Yep -some services will be harder than others, and costs will vary. I could take your exact sentence and replace S3 with Oracle or IBM Message Broker or Websphere or DB2 or an AS/400 or Microsoft Exchange, and it would be just as true.

The point is that right now there are plenty of similar enough cloud services out there, and also on premise options. If the decision is made to shift either onto a cloud service, or off, then consideration to the costs and practicalities should be given.
The problem is that the cost of cloud services is often delayed or hidden and you're up to your neck when you finally figure it out. The up front cost of traditional setups is what makes the cloud stuff look interesting.

I agree people are caught out, and I have been once. But in general the information is there and just requires the effort of calculating it out.

The traditional stuff requires ongoing expenditure, and that is often overlooked too. And local services are more likely to suffer from resource contention.

Have you had to wait for IT to provision a development server? (Yes, months. In one company it needed to be planned a year ahead and even then it was delayed)
Had to wait for AWS to provision a development server? (Yes, at least 5 minutes)

There is no silver bullet. No news to anyone with common sense, but that means cloud services have their place. An unpopular opinion here of course. Maybe its the lead.  :popcorn:
 
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Offline Red Squirrel

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But a professional application to be cloud and cloud only and need to call home every week or so to ? No thanks.

Btw, even worst, your OS.

For example Windows 10  -> Windows 10 users fume: Microsoft, where's our 'local account' option gone?  :palm:

Its starting and it seems like Microsoft is testing the ground of acceptance, slowly.

There is no way I will surrender the local admin account, this means only one thing, surrender your ownership, power and control over your own computer.

Its easy to imagine one day, you turned on your computer and suddenly your OS tells you that you are no longer can use your computer, access your files and all are locked, just because a dude which happened to be another country's leader said so.  :wtf: :rant:

Yeah I saw this crap coming when windows 8 started to do the "live account" crap.  That's around the time I switched to Linux.  I absolutely cannot fathom the idea of giving that much control of my computer to a 3rd party.  Unfortunately, the general public don't care, so that is really the direction things are going to go.  I bet next version of Windows will be completely cloud based.   Your login, everything, will be in the cloud.   Windows 10 is already basically a SAS model.  It may be installed locally, but MS has pretty much full control of it. 
 
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Offline james_s

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Unfortunately it seems everything is moving to cloud now and it will get harder and harder to resist.   Even things that arn't necessarily cloud based still require you to make an account and have the product tied to some cloud.  Game consoles for example are all like that now.   Even Gopros and DJI drones and lot of similar products.   Pisses me off, there's no technical reason for it to require that.  It's just done to track you.

The pendulum is swinging that way for now, but this has happened before. Mainframes and dumb terminals were all the rage at one point, then PCs got more powerful. It's not entirely unlikely that people will eventually rediscover the PC and all the benefits it has over cloud based.

Another thing to consider, computers and software as a whole are becoming mature, consider the latest version of MS Office vs the version from 25 years ago, a quarter century and yet for a huge majority of people Office '95 would probably do everything they need. Unless all these subscription products are able to keep finding new ways to stay ahead, the slow but steady march of FOSS tools continues to improve their quality. Today on my personal laptop I use LibreOffice even though I own a legal copy of MS Office simply because I couldn't be bothered to dig out my installation disc. I use KiCAD for developing PCBs, Inkscape for designing front panels and signs, GIMP for editing photos, Audacity for audio editing, and various other tools. All this free stuff is only getting better, in most cases one is not really forced to subscribe to cloud based offerings.
 
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Offline daqq

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If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up.
I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.

Welcome to EEVBLOG Forums, a Cloud-based service.
There's a bit of a difference - a forum, by definition, needs an internet connection (or a different connection to other computers) to exist. Also, it's hardly critical to our work. If Dave starts charging money for being here, or does something other that I'm not comfortable with I just bugger off. Or if he decides to end the forum, because reasons, well, sad, but been there, done that.

The other difference is that when I signed up I knew that this was a possibility. Same goes for google drive. Unlike eagle, which changed to subscription+cloud after, what, 30 years?
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Offline Brumby

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If you didn't see this was a bad idea 10 years ago, time to wake up.
I saw it as a bad idea from the very beginning.  I have never been tempted by Cloud anything.

Welcome to EEVBLOG Forums, a Cloud-based service.

Sure, however if the forum closed tomorrow, we can all go about our work and personal lives without a problem. It wouldn't have a "critical" impact on anyone.

PRECISELY.  (If we discount the psychological impact...  :scared: )


Quote
Personally, for all things storage/backup/syncing, I use a completely self-hosted solution. Yes, it involves an initial cost in building servers and infrastructure, but even when the internet is out (which in Australia is transient itself thanks to the NBN), I have full and complete access to everything including the movies and TV shows I enjoy watching.

Once I upgrade the memory in one of my servers this weekend, I will be building my own "cloud" solution based on NextCloud so I'll essentially have my own version of Google G-Suite except where I have complete control of the data.
In addition to your access to your data, there is a small matter of security from others accessing your data.  You are - quite literally - handing over your data to an entity that says "Trust me" ... and you have no physical control over that data.

I've gone out and acquired an old HP microserver and populated two bays to have that control.
 

Offline daqq

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You are - quite literally - handing over your data to an entity that says "Trust me" ... and you have no physical control over that data.
The solution to this is storing everything you need synced in a big encrypted archive :) If there's an entity out there desperate enough for my awful hacked together code that they'll brute force AES256, well, good for them. Yes, it's a bit of laziness on my part, but said data is not as sensitive.
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Offline bd139

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Yep -some services will be harder than others, and costs will vary. I could take your exact sentence and replace S3 with Oracle or IBM Message Broker or Websphere or DB2 or an AS/400 or Microsoft Exchange, and it would be just as true.

The point is that right now there are plenty of similar enough cloud services out there, and also on premise options. If the decision is made to shift either onto a cloud service, or off, then consideration to the costs and practicalities should be given.
The problem is that the cost of cloud services is often delayed or hidden and you're up to your neck when you finally figure it out. The up front cost of traditional setups is what makes the cloud stuff look interesting.

I agree people are caught out, and I have been once. But in general the information is there and just requires the effort of calculating it out.

The traditional stuff requires ongoing expenditure, and that is often overlooked too. And local services are more likely to suffer from resource contention.

Have you had to wait for IT to provision a development server? (Yes, months. In one company it needed to be planned a year ahead and even then it was delayed)
Had to wait for AWS to provision a development server? (Yes, at least 5 minutes)

There is no silver bullet. No news to anyone with common sense, but that means cloud services have their place. An unpopular opinion here of course. Maybe its the lead.  :popcorn:


Ahh the "AWS 5 minute myth", forgetting:

1. Security. Yeah lets just stick an RDP server on an EIP and leave it there for everyone on the Internet.
2. Patching. Yeah lets stick an unpatched AMI we found in the AWS rotten old shit store on our EC2 instance.
3. Availability. Yeah lets stick it in one AZ and watch it disappear one afternoon with all the ephemeral data because we don't understand AWS architecture leading to two days of downtime until the guy who set it all up comes back from holiday in a jungle with no phone reception.
4. Billing. Yeah lets roll out an instance we don't understand the costing of properly and get a nasty shock at the end of the billing cycle.
5. Latency and poor performance. Yeah lets find out the hard way that the thing lags like shit compared to in house hardware which doesn't share the cache and cores with a hacked AWS account running BTC mining.
6. Hidden IO problems. Yeah lets find out the hard way that AWS IOPS is provisioned differently depending on instance and storage size and actually a shitty old no brand SATA SSD in a desktop PC in the office has better IO throughput.
7. Exit. Yeah how do we get this turd out of AWS when the IT team tell us all the above was done wrong?

When you understand these, an AWS 5 minute job turns into a planning process.

The cloud is not a panacea; it's someone else's computer. The usual concerns are all still there just called different names and hiding under marketing.

Also who the fuck runs a dev server in 2019? What do you do on it. Last time I saw that it was a crazy company running their entire development team off an SMB share and using a physical wooden spoon as version control. You couldn't change the code, via windiff, unless you had the spoon.
 
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Offline hendorog

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Yep -some services will be harder than others, and costs will vary. I could take your exact sentence and replace S3 with Oracle or IBM Message Broker or Websphere or DB2 or an AS/400 or Microsoft Exchange, and it would be just as true.

The point is that right now there are plenty of similar enough cloud services out there, and also on premise options. If the decision is made to shift either onto a cloud service, or off, then consideration to the costs and practicalities should be given.
The problem is that the cost of cloud services is often delayed or hidden and you're up to your neck when you finally figure it out. The up front cost of traditional setups is what makes the cloud stuff look interesting.

I agree people are caught out, and I have been once. But in general the information is there and just requires the effort of calculating it out.

The traditional stuff requires ongoing expenditure, and that is often overlooked too. And local services are more likely to suffer from resource contention.

Have you had to wait for IT to provision a development server? (Yes, months. In one company it needed to be planned a year ahead and even then it was delayed)
Had to wait for AWS to provision a development server? (Yes, at least 5 minutes)

There is no silver bullet. No news to anyone with common sense, but that means cloud services have their place. An unpopular opinion here of course. Maybe its the lead.  :popcorn:


Ahh the "AWS 5 minute myth", forgetting:

1. Security. Yeah lets just stick an RDP server on an EIP and leave it there for everyone on the Internet.
2. Patching. Yeah lets stick an unpatched AMI we found in the AWS rotten old shit store on our EC2 instance.
3. Availability. Yeah lets stick it in one AZ and watch it disappear one afternoon with all the ephemeral data because we don't understand AWS architecture leading to two days of downtime until the guy who set it all up comes back from holiday in a jungle with no phone reception.
4. Billing. Yeah lets roll out an instance we don't understand the costing of properly and get a nasty shock at the end of the billing cycle.
5. Latency and poor performance. Yeah lets find out the hard way that the thing lags like shit compared to in house hardware which doesn't share the cache and cores with a hacked AWS account running BTC mining.
6. Hidden IO problems. Yeah lets find out the hard way that AWS IOPS is provisioned differently depending on instance and storage size and actually a shitty old no brand SATA SSD in a desktop PC in the office has better IO throughput.
7. Exit. Yeah how do we get this turd out of AWS when the IT team tell us all the above was done wrong?

When you understand these, an AWS 5 minute job turns into a planning process.

The cloud is not a panacea; it's someone else's computer. The usual concerns are all still there just called different names and hiding under marketing.

Also who the fuck runs a dev server in 2019? What do you do on it. Last time I saw that it was a crazy company running their entire development team off an SMB share and using a physical wooden spoon as version control. You couldn't change the code, via windiff, unless you had the spoon.

Good troll chap. If its not a troll then you need to broaden your thinking some. And read what I wrote, as you have misinterpreted it in an epic way.

Any sensible admin will know that they cannot plan for stuff they don't know about. Physical servers require advance planning. It gets worse if you put bloody minded managers in front of any request.
Any sensible developer will know they cannot move quickly if they need to give a different department a years warning to purchase servers and memory. So logically, you put admins and developers in the same team and benefit from both sets of experience and brains.

Your knee jerk reaction of "lets let anyone do anything" is not how it happens in the real world.

The 'IT team' are not there to tell developers what is right or wrong. Dev's and the admins are actually part of the same team, along with the business.

Sit down and have a serious think about how the a group could leverage the endless capacity of the cloud, while still satisfying the reasonable items in the issues you have listed above.


 
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Offline bd139

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I run real world companies in AWS and am AWS cert. I run my own company in AWS. My point is perfectly valid and it is exactly how a lot of companies operate that I have directly experienced.

Putting developers and admins in the same team I agree with. It's called devops. And I agree about capacity planning but your argument wasn't about capacity planning, which is a solved problem, but about bureaucracy and using AWS to leverage an advantage in that space.

The IT team, if not the business, are a service function of a business and usually poorly funded and invested in and seen as a parasitic annoyance. That's where all the problems start. The cloud isn't a solution there. You have to fix the perception and the humans first.
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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4. Billing. Yeah lets roll out an instance we don't understand the costing of properly and get a nasty shock at the end of the billing cycle.

Been there, done that!
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
 
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