The Limited Cloud

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The Limited Cloud

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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July 18, 2022 at 12:00 am

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skeleton567 SSCertifiable Points: 5672 More actions · Answer 1

Just read a news story about a CA crime where thieves stole $100 million in jewelry from an armored vehicle.

Reminds me of my days on the farm. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

Maybe the same applies to data storage too.

I remember the days of backups using mag tape. Several of us would each take some reels home with us. Might lose some, but not all.

Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125522 More actions · Answer 2

I have a few ideas about how to mitigate the cloud compute shortage.

For example, when a customer provisions an IaaS VM, the option 'Azure Spot instance' offers a much discounted rate with the VM running on transiently unused resources. The VM compute resource is deallocated if resources are needed by another pay-as-you-go service, but the data is persisted and the VM can be re-started. From the perspective of the customer, this can reduce costs for DEV and QA environments. From the perspective of the cloud provider, it means they don't have resources sitting idle.

Also, I'm wondering if the massive supply of legacy hardware (most of it only two or three years old) could still be leveraged for Azure hosting. For example, maybe Microsoft partners could create data centers running Azure Stack on top of low end machines and then provide consumer grade 3rd party Azure hosting. What I'm talking about is something like a GoDaddy offering budget Azure SQL hosting. Again, this would only be appropriate for specific use cases and customers.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 75898 More actions · Answer 3

I can remember a good friend being told "with our solution you can scale out as much as you want" and his response being "why the hell would I need to scale out for this use case"?

AWS has their 5 Pillars of the Well Architected Framework, I'm sure Azure has something similar and they probably say the same thing. If you stick with what their approach then you stand a fighting chance of keeping control of your costs and infrastructure.

I suspect that a huge volume of cloud resource is squandered by lack of attention to detail.

Spinning things up and being late to shut things down
Scaling out without validating the need to scale out.
Grandiose architectural design. CV driven design.

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 4

You also have to remember about licensing of SQL Server on spin-ups. I've never seen anything written about that but, disclaimer, I've not looked for such a thing. I only know that it's a thing.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 734449 More actions · Answer 5

licensing is extra confusing in the cloud. Sometimes licensing is included in an Azure SQL, sometimes not. You could easily be double licensed as not licensed at all

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125522 More actions · Answer 6

Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

licensing is extra confusing in the cloud. Sometimes licensing is included in an Azure SQL, sometimes not. You could easily be double licensed as not licensed at all

Azure SQL doesn't require a license, so notify Microsoft if the portal tries to charge you for one. 🙂

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125522 More actions · Answer 7

This is probably not an availability issue, since cloud providers replicate images and data across regional data centers by default. But I'm thinking that unanticipated spikes in temperature could present scalability issues, if the pool of available resources is temporarily reduced.

Heatwave in Europe forced Google and Oracle to shut down computers

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62202125

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 8

Eric M Russell wrote:

Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:
licensing is extra confusing in the cloud. Sometimes licensing is included in an Azure SQL, sometimes not. You could easily be double licensed as not licensed at all
Azure SQL doesn't require a license, so notify Microsoft if the portal tries to charge you for one. 🙂

Now there's a feature! Thanks, Eric. I didn't know that but it makes sense since they're the provider of the product. They do charge you on that for scaling up though, right? Might not be a "separate" charge... might just be "built in".

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125522 More actions · Answer 9

Jeff Moden wrote:

Eric M Russell wrote:
Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:
licensing is extra confusing in the cloud. Sometimes licensing is included in an Azure SQL, sometimes not. You could easily be double licensed as not licensed at all
Azure SQL doesn't require a license, so notify Microsoft if the portal tries to charge you for one. 🙂
Now there's a feature! Thanks, Eric. I didn't know that but it makes sense since they're the provider of the product. They do charge you on that for scaling up though, right? Might not be a "separate" charge... might just be "built in".

Well, there is a vCore licensing option, which would be useful when migrating an application from on-prem to Azure.

But most of our Azure SQL databases are on DTU pricing.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/service-tiers-dtu?view=azuresql

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-sql-database/single/

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003863 More actions · Answer 10

Ah... awesome. Thanks for the links, Eric.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)