March 31, 2018 at 11:01 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A New New Microsoft
April 3, 2018 at 1:13 am
I personally don't see the benefit for a medium sized company to go on the Cloud.
In my personal life, I prefer owning than renting (whether we are speaking about a car, a house, a computer or a software). You have more control over what you own than what you rent. The Cloud is just about renting hardware and software and sometimes DBAs. Your business become dependent from another company's business (if this company fails, you fails as well, if this company has become a monopoly and decide to raise its tariff you won't have other choices to propagate this rise to your customers or reduce your profit). Your internet becomes another utility bills. Your whole business will grind to a halt if your provider or your cloud platform's internet drop.
April 3, 2018 at 1:32 am
The problem is that people do getting excited by these buzz words except they don't understand them, why they need them or when it makes sense not to.
I work on a web product that uses a SQL Server DB backend and SQL Server reporting services. There is zero chance for us to move to the cloud because MS does not do SSRS in the cloud. The fact that SSRS is a miserable piece of crap that is a pain in the arse is one thing but then because you have to write your own custom authentication for it and MS don't seem to care about improving it. We looked at moving to SQL 2016 or 2017 and MS have only gone and wrecked the way you interact with SSRS objects and thus our custom authentication is completely broken. Problem is they haven't provided an alternate way in their interfaces for us to achieve the same thing so we are now on a ticking time bomb (end of lifecycle on SQL 2014).
On top of that all the articles I've read or videos I've watched about the cloud always seem to presume you are deploying a single instance or at the most a live/test/development version of 1 site. When you run a web app where each customer has their own instance and won't deploy without testing and often will jump from major version X to X + 2 or 3 then the whole premise of it's-so-easy-why-are-you-not-doing-this smary-ness that often comes from people waxing lyrical about the cloud really gets on my nerves.
April 4, 2018 at 3:21 am
Kyrilluk - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 1:13 AMI personally don't see the benefit for a medium sized company to go on the Cloud.
In my personal life, I prefer owning than renting (whether we are speaking about a car, a house, a computer or a software). You have more control over what you own than what you rent. The Cloud is just about renting hardware and software and sometimes DBAs. Your business become dependent from another company's business (if this company fails, you fails as well, if this company has become a monopoly and decide to raise its tariff you won't have other choices to propagate this rise to your customers or reduce your profit). Your internet becomes another utility bills. Your whole business will grind to a halt if your provider or your cloud platform's internet drop.
In the end , the cloud is a modernised version of the old mainframe Hosted /Bureau Service - it made sense for some companies to offload their IT infrastructure and not for others. If a hosted service was not for your organisation back then why would it be better now?
April 4, 2018 at 8:52 am
Kyrilluk - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 1:13 AMI personally don't see the benefit for a medium sized company to go on the Cloud.
In my personal life, I prefer owning than renting (whether we are speaking about a car, a house, a computer or a software). You have more control over what you own than what you rent. The Cloud is just about renting hardware and software and sometimes DBAs. Your business become dependent from another company's business (if this company fails, you fails as well, if this company has become a monopoly and decide to raise its tariff you won't have other choices to propagate this rise to your customers or reduce your profit). Your internet becomes another utility bills. Your whole business will grind to a halt if your provider or your cloud platform's internet drop.
It's more complicated in business than in your personal life because of the tax implications. Add to that the fact that you can avoid the overhead of a larger investment up front, the cloud makes lots of sense for all sizes of companies. Just not all situations.
April 4, 2018 at 8:53 am
peter.row - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 1:32 AMOn top of that all the articles I've read or videos I've watched about the cloud always seem to presume you are deploying a single instance or at the most a live/test/development version of 1 site. When you run a web app where each customer has their own instance and won't deploy without testing and often will jump from major version X to X + 2 or 3 then the whole premise of it's-so-easy-why-are-you-not-doing-this smary-ness that often comes from people waxing lyrical about the cloud really gets on my nerves.
I think you're missing some reading. Lots of the cloud is 1db/client, multi-tenant type of structures.
April 4, 2018 at 9:13 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, April 4, 2018 8:53 AMpeter.row - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 1:32 AMOn top of that all the articles I've read or videos I've watched about the cloud always seem to presume you are deploying a single instance or at the most a live/test/development version of 1 site. When you run a web app where each customer has their own instance and won't deploy without testing and often will jump from major version X to X + 2 or 3 then the whole premise of it's-so-easy-why-are-you-not-doing-this smary-ness that often comes from people waxing lyrical about the cloud really gets on my nerves.I think you're missing some reading. Lots of the cloud is 1db/client, multi-tenant type of structures.
I'm not talking about multi-tenant I'm talking about multi-instance and multi-envirorment, e.g. say I have 10 customers, then there will be 10 live environments, 10 test environments. Each 1 could be on a different version.
April 4, 2018 at 11:59 am
That's still the perfect place for the cloud. Spin up a group, or multiple groups, that have multiple resources for a new client. The cloud is built for this, whether you need 10VMs for each instance or just 10 apps and dbs, this is not that hard.
The driver for most of this is using scripting with a REST API or somethign like PoSh to drive this. There are customers that need to spin up a new live, test, and dev environment for a client. It's relatively easy and you don't worry about provisioning the hardware, you just get the services you need, whether that's a function in serveless, a relational db, a NoSQL db, a website, etc.
Examples are often written as "here's one", but duplicating that with automation to build multiple items is what the cloud is built to to.
April 5, 2018 at 12:57 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Wednesday, April 4, 2018 11:59 AMThat's still the perfect place for the cloud. Spin up a group, or multiple groups, that have multiple resources for a new client. The cloud is built for this, whether you need 10VMs for each instance or just 10 apps and dbs, this is not that hard.The driver for most of this is using scripting with a REST API or somethign like PoSh to drive this. There are customers that need to spin up a new live, test, and dev environment for a client. It's relatively easy and you don't worry about provisioning the hardware, you just get the services you need, whether that's a function in serveless, a relational db, a NoSQL db, a website, etc.
Examples are often written as "here's one", but duplicating that with automation to build multiple items is what the cloud is built to to.
Each one in my case is not an exact duplicate it may be the same software but each has different configuration (web.config, URL rewrite rules, host headers, SSL certificate etc..).
Plus we use SSRS (much to my annoyance) which means no to the cloud. I don't count VMs as the cloud because hosting companies having been using VMs for years before cloud became the silver bullet for everything.
Also their is the learning curve. People on my team know things about IIS, SQL Server, Windows Server and managing those. With the cloud proper (Azure DBs, Azure web apps etc..) you chuck all that knowledge and understanding under a bus and start over. Unfortunately we are in the catch-22 place of not having the time to learn it as there is always work to do, customer support to deal with, and we are not sure whether the cloud would even be a good fit for us.
April 9, 2018 at 8:47 am
peter.row - Thursday, April 5, 2018 12:57 AMAlso their is the learning curve. People on my team know things about IIS, SQL Server, Windows Server and managing those. With the cloud proper (Azure DBs, Azure web apps etc..) you chuck all that knowledge and understanding under a bus and start over. Unfortunately we are in the catch-22 place of not having the time to learn it as there is always work to do, customer support to deal with, and we are not sure whether the cloud would even be a good fit for us.
I'm not trying to tell you the cloud is a good fit. You have to decide that. However, setting up similar, but not exact copies, is exactly what works well in the cloud on on premises, if you script, use tokens, and have re-runnable scripting in place. The cloud isn't different from on-premises in many ways, though you do have some other options.
Much of the Azure stack (one small portion of the cloud) is exactly the same as on-premises. Most of the SQL stuff is exactly the same. You don't chuck things out the window, but the interfaces and some application coding may need to change. Azure Web apps look like IIS. You might deploy differently, but it's not that different. You do need to learn new things, but much of your knowledge is still there.
SSRS is hard, and certainly you could just run a VM in the cloud, but if you have a fairly static load, I think you're better off on premises.
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