Shapes in the Clouds

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Shapes in the Clouds

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Monday, April 13, 2009 3:38 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Shapes in the Clouds

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Post #696177

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 4:39 AM

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Around 4 years ago, I read something about developers who rented database servers in the Internet. They had a choice of MySql and SQL Server, I think. It's becoming common now and lower in price.

How is it different from the article, I am not sure but I guess providers would be giving different choices to DBAs.

A side question is, how much bandwidth to estimate? I remember the dial-up ISP optimization problem a decade ago: lack of modems during peak hours, plenty of unused modems in the middle of the night.

Post #696410

blandry

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 6:34 AM

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I've read the blogs and find the debate about the particulars of this subject to be interesting, and its nice to read what Steve has posted here - but all I see are the techies getting excited at this point and I can tell you from the management side that IT leaders are not buying into this idea right now. Why? Because it suggests giving up control of vital, private and often sensitive data.

The concept is great, but if some focus does not start to shine on the management issues, this is going to be hard to sell into the real business world. I am thinking of one of our clients who has some 6 petabytes of vital company data currently hosted on their own secure servers. If you think someone is going to go in there and tell them that that data will be hosted where? In the cloud? What cloud? Where? ... You can be sure that will be a VERY short business call - it ain't gonna sell.

Right now this is a "we can do this" idea. But there is very little out there that talks about "should we do this", and "how do we do this so it can be sold".

I don't know if its a fair comparison, but lets not forget that Windows Vista was also a "great idea". Unfortunately, as one can only hope Microsoft has finally learned, simply being able to do something, does not mean you should do it, or that if you do do it, that it will take hold.

There's no such thing as dumb questions, only poorly thought-out answers...

Post #696471

bob.willsie

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 6:46 AM

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Ok, I'm lost. I can understand an end user not really caring where the connection physically ends up at, but I would think a DBA would have to care.

At some point the URL has to ultimately represent and link to a physical data on a physical device doesn't it?

Doesn't economics mean that your basically going to be restricted to a limited number (2 or 3) of physical servers more or less mirroring each other in some manner.

Perhaps I am showing my ignorance of cloud computing. I understand it more as an etherial front end or a form of parrallel processing where multiple devices work together to give the impression of one massive device. However, at some point it all has to come down to actual physical materials being arranged in one direction or the other.

Or, would it be more like a super raid stripping system where one only needs to grab stripes from enough different physical devices to be able to rebuild the complete information set. Probably work well enough for reads, but writes across an indeterminate number of physical devices would seem to be a pain.

Or am I just way the hell, totally off track on this one?

Post #696481

GSquared

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 6:50 AM

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One thing that does sort of turn me off on this idea is an experience I had a few years ago. We were migrating a business-critical app from Access to SQL Server, and the decision was made to let the database be hosted by an outside company, since that was a lot cheaper than paying for servers on-site.

The migration went well, the application worked, but it was SLOW. A few milliseconds latency may not seem like much, but when it's a heavy OLTP app being used by a lot of people, it suddenly adds up to a very slow application.

A few months later, fed up with the performance, we moved the database in-house. Went from SLOW to screaming fast, with no other change that that latency going away. (Bandwidth never even came into it. We were using about 10% of the pipe at peak load.) Everyone was thrilled.

If cloud applications cause that kind of latency effect, I don't think they'll work for OLTP apps. I don't know enough about them to know if that'll be the case, but if the whole idea is that you won't know where the data is nor where the web page is, what if they end up on machines that are thousands of miles away from each other?

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Post #696486

Andy Lennon

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:11 AM

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I'm pretty skeptical myself. Ignoring for now the security/privacy concerns inherent in third-party data storage, performance would (i think) be a major issue.

I've been in a siutuation with some similarity to the one GSquared described: our client opened up a second office with about twice as many users connecting to the database as in the original location. Every couple of weeks we'd get calls from that second site complaining about connection slowness. Everytime, the assumption was that there was a problem in the database. Everytime, it turned out not to be the case. Bandwidth was fine; it was the latency. Satisfied

Additionally, how can you have control over the hardware configuration if the machine hosting your database is [indeterminant]? How could you optimize performance for TempDB without knowing what drive it's on, or what the specs for that drive are? how can you determine file size limits and growth when you don't know how much room there is?

It's possible that someone will be able to provide tools/services that can allay some of these concerns, but i haven't heard anything close to it yet.

Post #696562

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:30 AM

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Surprisingly, most of your concerns were what I heard in 95-99 about web apps. I think this will follow a similar path. There are plenty of people that host their own web apps, for example. SSC is self hosted. There are also people that buy a virtual web front, never worrying about any directory structure outside their site.

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Post #696588

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:31 AM

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blandry (4/14/2009)

...Because it suggests giving up control of vital, private and often sensitive data.
...
Right now this is a "we can do this" idea. But there is very little out there that talks about "should we do this", and "how do we do this so it can be sold".

Good points, but salesforce.com takes sensitive data every day. Maybe they're an anomaly, but I think there are others out there, just not as big.

I'm also not sure we can do this yet, or it's mature. It's probably more like 94-95 web technology. It's not there yet, but it's an idea.

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Post #696593

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:37 AM

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bob.willsie (4/14/2009)

Ok, I'm lost. I can understand an end user not really caring where the connection physically ends up at, but I would think a DBA would have to care.

I've got some more writing about this later in the week, but someone does need to know what is where. But not necessarily the DBA.

SANs are the first step of DBAs not knowing or caring about storage. at least they shouldn't. That might speak more to the training and monitoring of the SAN guys, but the server admins just need an SLA for performance of the disks.

I think that might happen with SQL Server. Imagine if you could designate 4 servers to be SQL Server and install SQL once as a cloud service. Then you'd deploy to this cloud service, not knowing, or worrying about if your database was being server from node 1, 2, or even both.

Granted someone might need to troubleshoot, but you'd hope that SQL would manage itself, firing hardware alerts when something didn't perform well. The hardware guys would fix things, leaving the DBA to manage, well, data (and security, packages, etc)

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Post #696599

bob.willsie

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:46 AM

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Ah, now I understand better. I've spent most of my career in small shops as a "jack of all trades, master of none."

Consequently I tend to think all the way down to the platter.

Looking at it from your perspective I understand better.

Thanks, Bobw

Post #696614

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