The Fundamental Cloud Decisions …
Why Don’t We Talk Much About The Cloud Anymore?
The Fundamental Cloud Decisions …
Imagine an architect not talking about buildings, a bridge engineer not talking about bridges, or a car manufacturer not talking about their cars. Well, in IT, we often fail to talk about the thing that holds up most of the industry … The Public Cloud. For some reason, we have forgotten about it in our debates. But, few areas of business are growing as fast as “the Cloud”, and companies such as IBM, Amazon and Microsoft see their profits increase on Cloud-based systems by the year.
To put it crudely, if we were to switch off the Cloud, everything around us would collapse.
Introduction
Yes. At one time, I spent a great deal of time in server rooms booting up rack-mounted servers with floppy disks and installing VMWare software. I plugged in my Dell switch and some Cat-5 cables, and (after an hour or so of linking servers into a cluster) I watched the magic happen. I could share compute, I could share data, I could share network resources.
The result was an amazing infrastructure — vSoC — and which allowed our cybersecurity students to have the tools and environment which could mirror those they would find in the industry. As teachers, we could define our own environments for our students, and set this up so that it was the same for every student. I gave us control, rather than using bland desktop environments. We could create networks, firewalls, servers and install the software that we needed for cybersecurity. It has since scaled around the world and has been a bedrock of our lab-based work. But, now I do not spend my time in server rooms, as I have control of all my data at the click of a button.
Can I have some Cloud?
We live in a PC-driven world, and where you can’t just scale our concepts of what happens on a PC into the Cloud. Everything has a cost, and understanding what you actually need is the core decision that you make. For this, you have to estimate what you actually do and the quality of service you are willing to give your customers. A better quality of service often leads to high bills.
Personally, I am often surprised when a student asks me for Cloud services for a project. “What do you need”, I say, and in reply, “16 core CPU, 1TB disk and 32GB of memory”, for which I reply, “But what are you actually doing?”, “I’m going to create a Web site with a database”, “And who will use it?”, “Just me”, “And what’s your data?”, “It’s just gathering some data from the Web”, “So, how much data?”, “About a megabyte a day, I suppose”, “Then, just get a free-tier instance with 0.5GB and one core, as a 16-core CPU, 1TB disk and 32 GB of memory will burst your bank account. If it needs to be bigger, in less than a minute, you can scale it all up.”
This type of discussion is the reason that costing is one of the first lessons that anyone should have when learning about the Cloud.
Infrastructure, Containers or Managed?
And so I remember all those debates about horizontal and vertical stacks and the importance of middleware. But where are we with this now? Well, AWS and Azure came along and changed the debate to … infrastructure services, container services and managed services (Figure 1).
For this, we basically had to decide whether we built and looked after something ourselves (infrastructure), whether we took a template of something and modified it (container) or whether we just let our Cloud provider to all the hard work for us. And so, we had to decide whether we let Amazon deal with all the patching and support for our database (such as with Dynomo DB) or whether we managed our own SQL data (with RDS or MS SQL). The core decisions lay in who was responsible for security, patching and setup, and the level of customization we need. Of course, we pay for virtually everything in the Cloud, so money matters in these choices.
The triad of customization, responsibility and cost
And, so, companies must understand the triad of customization, responsibility and cost. Overall, the client is always responsible for client-side encryption (as they have the data), but the demarcation lies in who actually does the encryption on the server. If the company wants to manage and hold the keys for encrypting on the file system or data, they have control of the keys, but if they trust Amazon to do this, then AWS will do it on their behalf.
With DynamoDB and S3 buckets, AWS holds the encryption keys and does the encryption, while with MS SQL and EBS (Elastic Block Storage), the customer takes responsibility for the server-side encryption. The managed services, too, lead more to a “lock-in” of your services, while infrastructure gives you the ability to move your services out of one cloud and into another one. Some, though, like the managed service approach, as it makes the bills a whole lot simpler.
Conclusions
Basically, we need to talk about the Cloud more. For security, for resilience, for quality of service, and because it underpins our modern world. Basically, it is the foundation of our industry, and its scope will only get greater by the minute.
I love using the Cloud, and I can have all the compute, network and data resources that IBM has - at the touch of a button (but I would need to afford it, of course). Never before in our history of computing has such power been held by so few.
But, we must worry about the power that Microsoft and Amazon will have. Just like Nigel Farage losing his bank account, the Cloud Service Provides could just decide to pull the plug on individuals or companies, and which could decimate them.
If you want to study AWS a bit more, try: