Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • Cost of the Cloud

    Will we get real time costing of our cloud computing?

    One of the benefits of moving to a cloud infrastructure for IT services should be a reduced cost. The economies of scale for having specialized staff, licensing, etc. are more evident when you have more of everything. The larger you are, the more efficient you ought to be. For some companies, this can be achieved internally because they have such a large number of computers, but for many companies, I think they seriously struggle with the cost of staff and infrastructure for technology.

    A company that looks to build a technology infrastructure has to make an investment and across a short period of time, they are locked into the hardware that has been purchased. Often we find individual departments are unsure they are receiving a fair share of the IT services, which has resulted in large chargeback systems being implemented that usually have a lot of overhead.

    Microsoft appears to be trying to deal with this in an interesting way. It has collected, and published, very detailed data on how the services in its data centers are being used. These are essentially a private cloud for many business units at Microsoft, and the ability to see how costs are being spent in applications, services, even help desk tickets, which can drive behavior.

    Developers now have an incentive to build better applications, since the cost of a poorly performing application is more easily determined. I would even assume that accounting for metrics in development environments should help people test different solutions, and perhaps even start to determine when one should spend more time optimizing code and when someone should allocate more hardware.

    I don’t know if other cloud computing vendors will start to offer detailed use analysis and charges for the use of their services, but I expect that if they did, it would be something that many CFOs, and CTOs might want to see in analyzing the value they get from their public, or private cloud infrastructures. I know that I’ve found value in all the detailed metrics that we get in costing SQL Server queries through DMVs, wait states, and other metrics, which can certainly help one write code much more efficiently.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Excel in the Clouds

    Excel Forever!

    I think that no matter what happens with Windows, SQL Server, and many other Microsoft products, Excel will be with us forever. It seems as though this quote is true: “Excel is a leading tool for data analysis today” (From Excel to the Cloud). Almost everyone that works with data uses Excel, including business users, and even Powerpivot didn’t bother to try and build a better interface. It’s built on Excel as an add-in.

    Microsoft Research has built a new way for Excel to interact with data sets in the cloud, with an add-in that brings various analysis algorithms to data using cloud computing. It’s built more for research and development, and not necessarily business, but it’s an interesting idea. I know that there are often scale issues with analysis systems, and computing resources can be expensive to maintain full time.

    The cloud , however, brings a more flexible way to scale up computing resources for specific problems. If you are involved in the analysis of large amount of data, this could be a great way to provision resources for people that need to analyze very large amounts of data. I don’t know how the economics would work for large transfers of data, but the scalability of buying CPU power only when you need it can be very attractive.

    The interface choice of Excel is another concession that it’s just the best way to look at data. It also is very familiar to most computer users, and removes the need to construct any type of application for users. I know that most of the time that I want to analyze lots of data, I drop it into Excel because it’s easier to manipulate and play what-if games; it’s certainly easier than using T-SQL aggregates.

    It also means that Excel is likely going to be with us forever. Between Windows and OSX, it’s got to be one of the most used applications in the world.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Cloud Outages

    Cound vendors need to make an effort to make their service "smarter"

    It seems that almost every few weeks there’s some announcement of an outage for a large service provider on the Internet. We’ve had Amazon Web Services go down, numerous Salesforce.com issues, and Microsoft’s Office 365 recently had problems. Most of us that work in IT are probably painfully aware of our own outages and how difficult it is to keep servers up across a long period of time.

    There are plenty of companies that have had outages, and I expect we’ll regularly see more announcements as companies look to engage cloud computing services. This isn’t to say that cloud services are unreliable, or even less reliable than in-house services. As is the case with many choices, your mileage may vary (YMMV) no matter which way you choose to provision your IT infrastructure.

    In my mind, we need to ensure that cloud computing vendors take these outages seriously, inform customers what went wrong, what was fixed, and what is being done to reduce the chances of outages in the future. Google has a dashboard, which is actually nice, albeit a little simple. It ignores some large Google sites, like Blogger, which had an issue a few weeks ago that was very annoying for me as I tried to publish a few entries.

    One would hope that cloud services would take their responsibility to offer a service seriously, and have less downtime than any random IT department. However the people running many of the daily operations at cloud service providers aren’t the best of the best IT people. They’re the IT people just like you and me that have a job to do, and do it with varying degrees of professionalism, and success. I would hope that they have better procedures, more consistent monitoring, and quicker response times, and some will, but not all of them.

    Moving to the cloud solves some problems in an IT infrastructure, but at the expense of less oversight, potentially less security, and certainly less control over how the daily operations are handled. It should result in better reliability for the systems over time, but as I mentioned, YMMV.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Care of Data

    It's not just a Dropbox problem

    DBAs are supposed to be trustworthy. After all, they are the custodians of data and often have access to sensitive information because of the nature of their system administrator level privileges. Their turnover ought to be low, and hopefully they have spent years building skills and a reputation that will provide them with a good job. They ought to value this investment and treat it seriously. Customer Service people are not usually in the same position in their careers, often at the beginning of their technical careers and usually change jobs regularly.

    Recently Dropbox had to back off the stance that it’s employees can’t view your data, with this note that their staff can access your files in some circumstances. There’s no evidence that employees have mis-used their access, but it could happen, and that’s a concern. It’s a concern with any cloud based service, and I think this is one area that cloud-type vendors really need to assure their customers that it won’t happen.

    Another major concern is overall security. If a cloud vendor’s employees can access your files, so can a hacker that gains access. That is, likely, an overriding concern of many customers, and it’s an area that I think that we really need to disclose openly the measures taken, the auditing in place, and the monitoring to detect any issues. Better encryption that actually prevents access by the vendor or it’s employees is a better solution.

    I hope we get encryption methods because the third major concern with cloud data is access by legal authorities. There are cases where the government might have a right to access your data, but that should be when they serve you with notice, not some company that is holding your data.

    There are many great customer service people and DBAs with strong worth ethics and morals. They take their responsibility as the custodian of your data seriously. There are a few, however, that are not so professional, and release information, sell data, put stories or video on some site like YouTube or TheDailyWTF for a laugh. Something that I’m not sure most of us that store data in the cloud would like to see happen with our pictures or video, and definitely something that companies would not want to see with proprietary information.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts