What about online backup?  Carbonite?

Just cements my thinking on whether to try to grow my small company or just stay small. Screw it I'm 52 with low overhead, I rely on the server based software for looking up parts and pricing and bookkeeping. But I can easily go back to a book a paper ledger and carbon copy invoices.

Online backups are good for recovering from catastrophic data loss (ie, your house burned down).  Just make sure that you keep your account current and you have a secure password with MFA.  Also ensure that your data is encrypted.  I use cloud storage as a secondary backup for my important personal stuff.  Primary backup is to my NAS and or portable USB drives.

Pretty sure Salesforce has thrown right leaning companies off their platform.

As an AWS architect I have to admit this was an eye opener.  I can‘t recall anyone getting publicity when getting kicked off AWS.  I’m sure it happened, but assumed it was dipsticks that deserved it.

The evidence I’ve seen is that Parler was working with them on any concerns that this hammer fell with no adjudication and no ability to take corrective action.  AWS basically selected the winner (Twitter) and kept them while booting the loser.

So what does this mean?  How can anyone lock into AWS?  NFW.  Not the local police, police unions, ICE, boarder patrol, gun shop, church  The list goes on forever.  Fall out of favor with the leftist and they can end you and pick your competitor as the winner.

No thanks.   AWS devops tools are dead to me (already were).  Orchestrating a bunch of EC2s?  Get out of here.  We will orchestrate containers with open source.

But what really sucks is the lock-in with some really cool services.  S3 is insanely powerful.  IAM everywhere too.  The list goes on.  I can’t recommend that any more.

I use to poo poo the cloud agnostic folks.  No more.

A contract!? You can get ooma for the monthly price of the taxes on a phone. Maybe $5/mo. No contract.

Anyone who bills themselves as being "politically agnostic" is viewed by the left as being hostile to their cause - and thus subject to attack.

In their minds, AWS did nothing wrong - and anyone who believes otherwise is an enemy.

Yes, there's probably money to be made by servicing "deplorables" - but it comes with a lot of headaches.

Kubernetes seems popular for a reason. I've seen customers running multi DC/service providers using mixed virtualization tech. I think our standard on one offering is bare metal bootstrapped to a single vm as a hypervisor, with a vm on that as master/worker nodes, which then run the actual containers. It's so far removed from the underlying setup it can be ran on damn near anything.

You will own nothing, and like it.

I meant a one-time installation contract. 13 handsets and a Polycom.

Please explain

And sometimes the free market will see an opportunity.

Nailed it. Coupled with the UBI that IS coming, we're heading towards a social credit system like China. Want to buy guns or ammo? Sorry your monthly "stimulus payment" doesn't allow for that. Want to support a conservative business? Sorry they're on the blacklist. Etc. Etc.

Even for your personal use the cloud never seemed like a good idea to me.

I worry those with the capital have too much to lose; those with the desire don't have the capital. The barrier to entry is getting mighty high.

We currently (and have since the 60s) run our own data centers. Only in the last year did we start putting anything in the cloud and that was forced through acquisitions. I'm curious to see if this has any impact on our plans to move more workload.

Moving to cloud is convenient and cheaper (for now), but the risks aren't worth it. It makes sense for test and dev environments but moving production to cloud is a bad idea. First you lose control of your data. Say the wrong thing and AWS shuts you down destroying your business. Second, they will eventually raise prices on you once it's impossible to find an alternative. I've worked in data centers for a while and the prospect of moving to cloud was depressing. I'm nearing the end of my career so it won't affect me personally but I felt bad for the younger guys I work with. I hope this wakes people up to what a bad idea it is to move everything to a cloud provider.

Not a boomer but some people from that generation have the best all around understanding of technology in my opinion. I've found many of them know both hardware and software really well. I don't see that much in younger people I work with.

"Just buy your own servers" is the IT equivalent of "file down the sear."

Or any other utility, isn't teh interwebz a utility?

IME, those guys are typically EE/ME types that like playing with "toys".

Another year and I’ll be ready for that.

There is no cloud...

It's just somebody else's computer.

Attached File

It’s quite ingenious...

This thread reminds me that I need to get my server back up and running.

I’ve been storing things on a friend’s server for a bit, but just like with mine, his motherboard bit the dust.

@Darkstar117 can you give me an overview of your build so I know what to buy? Assuming a NAS, and some sort of personal cloud software. A fixed ip address with your isp?

That's why you're being ignored, that statement is really something.

This short clip holds a lot of information; often hidden multifaceted implications of important historical events, as well as relevance to the present, and a possible future.

@Toblerone

More related to the OP's topic...

Everyone should watch this. The main clip was from August or September last year. Things are way worse than most people could even imagine, but there is still time, and hope, if you hold it in your heart.

ETA: and act now, before it becomes impossible not to, and there’s only two choices left.

I'm in IT and I've been making that argument ever since the whole cloud thing began.

If the internet goes down but your company has its own servers then you can function. And the internet could go down, long term, for lot of reasons. The Nashville bombing took down a lot of things for the whole region for a couple days.

A server with your working server running virtual machines. Sort of a server within a server. Then back up locally with Veeam. If something happens to the virtual machine it can be restored with Veeam. If the hardware dies you can move the VM to another physical server. You can even have multiple physical machines and set things up so that if one physical machine dies the other physical machine (with a copy of the virtual machine) can take over. (Make sure you check and verify those backups on a regular basis.) Put the veeam backups on separate mirrored drives and you are protected by anything except the building burning down or other physical disasters. (The physical machines could even be kept in different rooms to reduce the chance that a physical disaster (broken pipe maybe) could take out both servers.

And then you want some offsite data backup. I have little experience with Carbonite but it probably works just fine. Data backups won't get you back up and running quickly if there is a disaster. But if your building burns down you are probably going to be shut down for a few days anyway so this isn't that big of a deal.

And I would get a good managed IT company to at least assist you with the setup. IT stuff generally isn't all that hard but it is highly specialized and doing it wrong can be really, really bad for your business.

Having your own servers is not so easy.  My issue with my own data center is infrastructure, AC and power.  I have 10 server racks in my server room and the temperature shoots up whenever we have a problem with the AC.  And It love to go off on Sunday.  We have 6 portable Moveincool AC units as backup but we had to put exhaust fans in the ceiling to move the hot air.  Then factor in the cost of redundant power and ups for each server.  Plus it would have cost a half a million $ to install a generator to power everything. As nyc becomes Detroit this may become a bigger issue.   I can’t wait to get everything out of my office and into the cloud or colo.  Plus we are a lefty org so we are safe (for now) from the woken.  I have written AWS of my plans.

It depends on what you do.  My organization is internet dependent.  Without email and internet most people might as well stay home.

The need for cooling and backup power doesn't go away with data relocation.

Anyone else who was hosting your data would still be dealing with it.

The difference is that you won't have any control over how well they deal with it.

It is not just about where your server is.  You still need to have your DNS listed, you still need to have bandwidth.  Hell you still need electricity.  Then even if you do all those things - you could still be raided by the FBI or investigated by the IRS (and that happened in the Obama era).

Hell - even if you do all that, you better be prepared to only accept postal money orders as payments - as banks can lock you out of their CC system.  Hell some will even lock access to your accounts if you are deemed to breach their service agreement (talking about you Paypal).  Want a business loan - good fucking luck.

there are several, not insurmountable issues. basically it comes down to cost. if you are serious, you need at least two regional data centers, the data centers need high speed commercial links from at least two different vendors, you need a generator or two, you need battery backup.

going to some high end rack mounded hardware is probably less of an issue than getting the truly high speed internet connections and dedicated IP space..

my company runs there own data centers in a number of different cities across the us. im part of the current company because my original company was bought and merged with several others. in that original company we had our own datacenters but moved to a cloud provider. once bought in the last go around, our servers moved to our own facilities.

one thing you might look into is running dedicated vmware servers in some providers rack space (or cloud). so you are leasing physical servers configuring the vms and software and in control of you vmware space.

the risk that folks have experienced here is something that most companies are not going to see. because they dont run social media apps at all. so there is no potential issue with 'unacceptable' social behavior. one glaring example is porn. some porn is a pretty raw. yet you dont hear about those sites getting shut down. so the real issue is political cleansing of various things. avoid politics and you will most likely avoid the kind of condemnation that gets you 'deplatformed'.

and it should be obvious that such 'social cleansing' is here to stay. and it will increase in the internet.

the internet is something new in the world. before information flowed in one direction, for the mass media providers to the public. now information can flow in all directions. anyone can open a twitter account (until they cross the social cleansing rubicon). that is new. and things like Q, the mob chaos in DC and all kinds of similar things can start at any place where someone(s) is able to instigate some sort of mob action by hitting the rite 'nerve' in a group of people. ISIS took great advantage of this for a while. the lessons (and the consequences) should be obvious.

its complicated. im not a cpa, but i suspect for a lot of companies, leasing or buying services from AWS, google or microsoft is a not like the fixed cost with depreciation that you have if you buy your own equipment and have your own datacenters. a lot of companies that are on the internet were built to eventually be sold. the fact that a buyer can come in and buy the intellectual property and the customer base of a company but hot have to pick up a bunch of fixed assets, especially if they have their own datacenters or use a major cloud provider plays into a lot of what is going on. and you dont have to have the folks managing the facilities either. and adding, moving or reducing facilities is super easy.

Burn said hoster down after said hostile censorship....profit

bulldozer time then?
shut down my business  and ill do the same to theirs?
the fact that these shutdowns dont result in MASSIVE damages lawsuits is insane. you cant just up and decide to close down business with someone without giving them a heads up.

It's ok if you don't believe me but I'm not lying when I say we HAD the capacity to be a competitive cloud service provider for external clients if we had wanted. It doesn't align with our core business model but at the same time they are looking to expand into different areas to diversify.

It's moot now, we don't anymore.

We've been moving to cloud and AWS and i don't think they are going to change.  

I've been pushing things like Truenas Enterprise and NextCloud as a means of cost cutting and ending reliance on other vendors.  
I hate cloud services with a passion.  You lose control of your data, and your company/infrastructure being relatively unknown ingles you are a fortune 500 company is less likely to be targeted than Amazon, Cloufare, etc.
Add with the glass in Amazon hosting found a few years ago, the ENTIRE infrastructure of every hosted business is at risk from the least secure entity in the group.
There was an issue where it someone didn't change the default admin password on their web console, that admin account could be granted full permissions to EVERY admin account in that hosting cluster, so it went cross site and domain since the account was on the AWS layer.

I hope you can still get good peering. Lucky if they let you connect to the internet at all anymore.

The cloud = someone else's computer or service.

It's not about hardware.  Did you offer a huge menu of services, all of them available via API?  Could I click a button in your console and make my server available on another continent, in a couple hours?  Did you offer a linux distro built to integrate with your service?  What was your answer to S3?

These cloud providers are not just renting time on servers. No matter how much hardware you had, if you think that's what made you ready to compete with AWS then that pretty obviously proves you don't understand what it is.  

It really is.  And ice is frozen water.  Who is it that is supposed to be confused about this?  15 years ago, sure.  But who doesn't understand what a cloud provider is now?

That is generally true. Cloud costs add up quick, especially with AWS and Azure. Those two providers nickle and dime you for everything.

It is a utility now.  Therefore it can be regulated.

You buy your own servers and the the son of a bitches remove your IP registration from all the DNS servers.

Now what?