Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • The Cloud is Better In At Least One Way

    Many people don’t see the cloud platform as necessarily better run than what they do in their local data center. That might be true, and certainly the caliber of people, their experience, responsiveness, and more can make a big difference to the way in which any environment operates. One would like to think that AWS, Azure, Google Compute, etc. would all hire the best people and pay them more to operate a top notch system. I’m sure they have some of those people, but they also may have some average people that might not be better than your administrators.

    Corruption is something I’ve experienced a few times in my career, and it was incredibly scary each time. I’ve been on multi-day support calls, trying to recover data, exported out pages to reconstruct values, and had to have very difficult conversations with management and clients to let them know data is gone. I think the worst experiences for me were breaking the news to workers that would have to try and re-enter data. Many of them had lots of extra work to look forward to without extra pay.

    The Microsoft Azure team takes corruption seriously, and there’s a good description in this post of how they protect against and deal with corruption in Azure SQL Database. It’s quite comprehensive, and it’s a set of things that I wouldn’t expect most companies to implement. Even some of the better SQL Server people I know don’t necessarily get called in during off hours when a corruption alert fires. Plenty of people working with SQL Server might not have been through an Immersion event and understand how to even deal with corruption outside of calling Microsoft.

    The cloud is a vast array of service and settings, many of which we can manage ourselves. In those cases, certainly the cloud might not do a better job than we would. No one on a cloud vendor’s staff is going to manage your VM or help you ensure your database design is solid. However, in checking for corruption, ensuring disk level backups, watching for DDOS and other threat vectors, the cloud vendors certainly do a better job than most of us. And for corruption, Azure SQL Database seems better watched than most databases I’ve seen in my career.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Avalanche of Cloud Computing

    Cloud computing is growing fast. The leader, Amazon and Microsoft, continue to show more and more customers using their platforms every quarter. I do truly think that an increasing number of organizations are thinking cloud first for application development. That doesn’t mean all systems, nor does it mean that they won’t opt to bring their code back on premises, but they are considering the cloud.

    Will this trend continue? For most of my life, I’ve seen trends come and go, but the popular ones continue to evolve and grow. I suspect that for now, cloud computing is attractive in many ways, not the least of which is a shift from a large up-front investment to a small pay as you go charge. Lots of finance people would rather see this as a way of investing in computing for their organization, knowing they can cancel and switch their investment elsewhere.

    I think clearly the cloud will continue to grow for now, but will companies ever reverse the trend and move things back on premises? I wonder. It does seem that many people try to move to the cloud and struggle with the application changes, the unexpectedly high monthly costs, and the wandering performance levels of their systems. For executives used to knowing what the predictable level of performance was, even if poor, having systems (appear to) run randomly slower or faster can be maddening. I think some of this is the lack of understanding of cloud paradigms and programming practices for many developers as well as poor application architectures. But that’s the state of the world, so if systems don’t run well, why would you move away from your current data center?

    The major cloud providers are providing lots of services and incentives, and certainly they are working hard to sell you computing resources. For some technologies, this makes perfect sense. I’d never set up an email server or system again, relying on a service like GMail or O365. I’ not sure I’d even want to host a web server again, expecting that something like App Services is just out there, and I can drop my code in a location and I’ll have a running website. And, of course, I love VSTS. If I were a developer starting a company, or a project, I’d consider using something like VSTS or a TeamCity suite with a cloud VCS. I mean, why invest and manage servers? I just want services.

    There are issues with cloud computing, and certainly your flexibility can be limited. Security offerings are both better and worse, and pricing can be steep as you scale up. Of course, if you scale down you haven’t spent a bunch of money on extra hardware. Overall, I think there are some sweet spots for cloud computing, and even though some workloads don’t make sense, I’d expect that it’s worth considering the cloud first.

    I do expect that some services, such as email, may never come back on premises. I also think some of the skills and tools we use will change, evolve, or disappear. For everyone, I’d suggest you experiment and learn some things about the cloud. Get a free account to experiment with, download emulators, or just watch a lot of presentations and content on the cloud. Whether you have plans to move or feel pressure now, I’m sure you’ll have to deal with the cloud at some point in the next ten years, so be prepared.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Who’s Responsible?

    In college and for a short time afterwards, I worked at restaurants in various capacities. I’ve held most of the jobs available and enjoyed my experiences. I had good and bad bosses and sometimes had to endure questionable practices from management. Often I needed money, so I couldn’t take a moral stand and was at the mercy of some manager. I think a bad restaurant manager at a part-time bartending position eventually caused me to choose to leave that industry. With a fulltime day job in technology, I could forgo the extra weekend money to avoid additional stress.

    Bad managers and practices still exist, and I was reminded of this in an article recently. The practice of forcing employees to pay for mistakes is blatantly illegal, and I hope someone gets a few days in jail as a result of the case. However, I started to wonder if this trend might ever make it to our industry. Especially with the changes in services as more systems move to cloud environments.

    I’ve worked in companies that debated my expense reports, and refused payment for some charges. Some of your might have had the same experiences, which often cause you to be very cautious about future expenditures. That could be good or bad for business, but it certainly is a problem for the employee.

    These days I find plenty of employees that will setup or provision some cloud service using their own credit card, expecting to be reimbursed at the end of the month. What happens if the company doesn’t want to pay? A manager decides the service wasn’t necessary. What would you do? What if you provision the wrong service, or forget to terminate something. These are common mistakes in business, but would you pay for the mistake? What if you didn’t pay for the service, but the company wants to deduct the charges made by mistakes from your paycheck. Do you fight this? Bring a lawsuit? Plenty of possible actions might ensure you aren’t financially penalized but could cost you your job.

    I’d like to think that this wouldn’t be an issue for salaried, technology workers, but I wonder. Is there any reason to worry? Let me know what you think.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Financial DBA

    I’ve got an Azure subscription. At least, I think I have just one. I know I have a few Microsoft accounts, across 4 (or more) different email addresses, that I use for various VSTS development purposes, but only one should have any Azure resources. When  I check each of them, I find that I do only have resources (and charges) for one. However, I also found a strange charge on my credit card statement from Microsoft Azure. It was just a couple dollars, but as I started digging through the various statements, I couldn’t determine where the charge was from, or what it was for. As of now, I’ve opened a support case with Microsoft to track down my usage.

    This has me thinking of the future of many data professionals, some of whom will certainly have a few assets in a cloud based environment. I have a small subscription, but plenty of resources, and keeping track of which items belong to which resources and what I need isn’t always easy. It’s quite the challenge, especially when billing and finance aren’t my job. In an organization like Redgate, I’d guess we have lots resources, some of which developer provision, need, and then might forget about. Who reconciles this and ensures the assets we have are those we need?

    As we move to a world where services are used as often as assets, perhaps interchangeably, I expect that many of us will need to be accountable for not only the usage, but tracking why we’ve engaged that service. Over time, we need to retire and get rid of assets, but ensuring we remember exactly what we’re using and why can be hard over time. With a little employee movement, many of us might find ourselves in charge of services that we don’t understand, and might not be sure are necessary. We also might not be sure these services can just be discarded. The last thing we want is some uptime disruption because we terminated some service contract.

    A whole new dimension to our job is likely coming, and for many of us, this will test our documentation and organizational skills. I wouldn’t be surprised to find many DBAs or lead developers having a standing monthly meeting with someone in finance to be sure we aren’t wasting money.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.