Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • The Subtle Push to the Cloud

    With SQL Server 2014 released, there’s the temptation to upgrade for many DBAs. However the licensing costs and debatable improvements in the product will temper the DBA’s enthusiasm with the reality of the ROI seen by management. While reading about the licensing changes, I also saw this note from Tom LaRock, where he wrote about the features most of us aren’t using. It made me think about upgrades, and perhaps the strategy Microsoft is employing.

    As Tom mentioned, the features not being used are Enterprise Edition features. This prevents many of us from upgrading to use them because Enterprise Edition is so expensive. Actually, even Standard Edition is expansive these days, given the per-core licensing, and I suspect lots of companies with SQL Server 2008, 2005, even 2000 are debating whether or not the upgrade is really worth the cost.

    The piece also mentions that Azure is much less expensive in the short term, and you should consider it. Of course at some point the money you pay will be more than buying a license and a server, but that assumes you run them for the same length of time. You’ll likely upgrade at some point, and if you upgrade both hardware and software, the cloud starts to look more attractive.

    It’s not simple to move into the cloud, nor is it appropriate for some applications, but it does seem that Microsoft would prefer to have most companies running in Azure, on a single platform they run, they patch, and they support. Many companies might prefer the same thing, though I do worry that we might find the on-premises version of many products becoming second class citizens. Vendors will spend less on development and support if too many customers move to the cloud.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Data Platform Vision

    Recently the Microsoft Data Platform blog published a piece on what drives Microsoft’s vision. It’s an interesting look at the ways in which data is being used in some businesses as well as the variety of types of situations that must be dealt with. There is this idea that the value derived from having lots of different data was once only used by specialized companies or applications. However today, it’s being more widely analyzed and accepted by more businesses. Of course, the vision is that Microsoft can help those businesses.

    In the cloud.

    I know this piece is more marketing than technical, but I have concerns that Microsoft is not driven by what customers want and need, but is instead seeking to drive customers to their own tooling and offerings in the Azure cloud. While I do like many things about the cloud and think it has a place in the future of many companies, I also think that there are still lots of opportunities, as well as demand from customers, for on-premises solutions.

    I worry that the focus of Microsoft, which can be tightly bound in one idea as they eye more sales revenue, is driven with the idea that everyone, and all applications, will some day be in the cloud. I can’t see that in the future for many businesses, and certainly hope that Microsoft recognizes this. Otherwise many of our hybrid solutions that push some data into the cloud might be backed by PostgreSQL or some other platforms as the on-premises database.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Cloud

    I like the cloud. It’s very handy for a lot of the things I do. I like having backups restored for my iPhone upgrade. I appreciate having my documents synced through Evernote, Dropbox, and OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) automatically moving to new machines. These services are incredibly convenient and handy. I expect that my mail will be accessible from multiple machines and my blog posts can be created, edited, and published from anywhere. Many of us work in a similar fashion, using the cloud as a service construct in much of our lives. In fact, many of us expect our own knowledge will be supplemented by the cloud. We use Google to search, getting us syntax,  solutions, or ideas from sources that we expect to just be there.

    Someone was talking to me about their concerns with the cloud recently. This person thought the cloud would be a fad that passes quickly and businesses will get back to owning, hosting, and managing their servers from the bare metal up to the network connection. I disagreed, and not because I use the cloud personally.

    I remember setting up a web server in 1996 for a company. I remember installing an email server in 1999. I would never do either of those things again for my own company, and I wouldn’t expect it from most companies. These days we’ve learned that email can easily be handled by a third party and more and more companies are using email services instead of managing their own systems. Web servers are mostly a shared service that we rent from any number of other companies, sometimes even stitching together a presence across multiple providers. Even many companies that want to manage their own host operating system are turning to third party companies to manage the hardware and networking. More and more we accept renting the things we need from others.

    We’ll get there with databases as well. Not all databases, but more and more of them will be hosted at third party companies. Whether this is in some type of VM environment or a service that hosts data, it will still be hosted at a third party. We will have concerns and we will have reasons to not do this, but I think for more and more of our data, we won’t care.

    Companies have lots of systems in place. They have legacy investments in infrastructure and facilities. In those cases, it’s hard to justify the cost of cloud computing. However as we grow into new areas, or with new companies, we’ll have to re-evaluate whether it is a good idea to continue to make those investments. As the management of software grows to allow the quick scale up and down of assets, I think we’ll be much more likely to consider moving applications into the cloud than ever before.

    We’ll never be 100% in the cloud, or out of it, in the future, but increasingly, we’ll be partners with the cloud.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #48–Cloud Atlas

    tsqltuesdayI never saw the movie, though it’s on my list to watch sometime. I love the Wachowski’s as directors.

    This month Jorge Segarra is hosting. He is better known as the SQLChicken, and his theme this month is Cloud Atlas. He’s asking us to write about the cloud and what we think of it. What’s our take on the cloud. He wants to know if we’ve used it, what we think, probably how we even define it. It’s a great question with all the media and hype about the cloud, especially for data professionals.

    This is a monthly blog party, where bloggers write on a specific topic every month, on the second Tuesday. I’ve got a complete list of topics on this blog, and to participate, do this:

    • write a blog
    • publish it on the Tuesday, November 12, 2013 (for this month)
    • be sure a trackback or comment is on Jorge’s blog invitation
    • include the T-SQL Tuesday logo, linked to the invitation.

    That’s it. Write, and enjoy.

    The Cloud Atlas

    What is the cloud? It’s been hyped in commercials and numerous articles, and to some extent I think we don’t have a good definition. We have PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, all of which are legitimately the “cloud” for different people.

    As far as I’m concerned, the cloud really is any computing service that is provided by a vendor. This means you don’t own the hardware and rent out either a machine (physical or virtual), a service, a set of APIs, etc. This exclude co-location, but anything else from renting a VM to using IFTTT, is cloud computing.

    With that in mind, what do I think? There are certainly problems with the cloud in terms of security and recovery of data. However I think the promise of renting out computing resources (machines/platform/software/services) in a scalable fashion is amazing to me.

    Do I use the cloud? Sure. I have Evernote, Skydrive and Dropbox to keep my data in sync. My family uses OurGroceries to manage a shopping list. We daughter is hooked on Spotify, which alleviates the need to keep much music on her device. I even have backups of data on Glacier.

    On the career side, we (SQLServerCentral and Red Gate) offer AdventureWorks on Azure for users to play with. I’ve done minor work in Azure, and spun up a SQL instance on AWS. I haven’t actually done anything more than test, personally, but certainly the cloud is useful for SQLServerCentral. We host our database server and web server on virtual machines we rent from Rackspace. We use a Content Delivery Network for some videos and YouTube for others. We’ve dramatically lowered costs and increased scale with the cloud.

    The cloud works.

    Sometimes.

    For some applications.