Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • Cloud Hacking

    Hackers are training for the cloud challenges

    Not everyone is down on the cloud. Apparently someone found a great use for pay-as-you-go computing in the cloud by using it to hack wireless networks. What’s next, someone using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find security holes in police patrols of local businesses? It constantly amazes me just how someone will take a technology that is very handy and turn it into a tool used for criminal purposes. I suppose we just have to live with this use of technology and learn to protect ourselves as much as possible.

    I think that security will be one of the bigger impediments to cloud adoption than anything else. Sure there’s the cost factor of data transfers, and trying to determine how to manage the costs of large bursts. There’s the need to integrate local and cloud development codebases, and potential patching/version issues. However those are not large issues when compared with the potential security issues that come with cloud computing.

    Even as we move to private cloud structures, we may have security issues with more resources being grouped under one large services umbrella and the difficulties of managing security for large numbers of users. We want to use groups to make management easier, but the more people you manage and the more groups that become involved, the more likely it is that you will have some security hole in your system.

    I think we’ll start to find more hackers that will discover, and take advantage of, hole in cloud security that we haven’t thought of. As they do, we’ll see more resistance from companies in migrating their infrastructures. At least until it becomes more cost effective to do so. Then we’ll discover that many of those security issues don’t seem to matter quite as much.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72385/)

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  • The Importance of My Cloud Data

    I recently rebuilt my laptop, and when I installed Office, there was an offer to sync my Office data up to the cloud. I declined since I already use Live Mesh to sync data across multiple machines, a Windows Home Server for local backups, and Dropbox for remote ones. It’s not that I don’t like the cloud, but that I’m not sure I, Steve Jones, can trust the cloud.

    There was an outage at Hotmail recently that involved SQL Server. That’s bound to happen as the larger you are, the more likely it is that you will have some sort of failure.  It’s inevitable, and hopefully you have done enough planning to recover quickly. I don’t know where the Hotmail team failed, but they certainly failed somewhere.

    The cloud works because it provides some great economies of scale, a much more efficient use of computing resources. For many people, that means it can also be a much cheaper way to get the services they need. Even companies could do find advantages in using cloud-based services.

    However this outage shows one of my major concerns. It’s not that I find Hotmail unreliable, or that I worry about security. It’s that when something breaks, and it will, I’m not sure Hotmail will care a lot about my data. If Steve Jones, Inc., a company paying Microsoft $1000 a year for mail, Office, etc.,  winds up losing 3 days of service and 1 week’s worth of data, will Microsoft care? What if the same failures affect a large company, one that pays Microsoft $1,000,000 a year? Whose data will they work harder to restore?

    Ultimately economics and realities set in. Microsoft, and every single other cloud provider out there, will worry about the larger customers first, and perhaps not even bother to finish restoring data for the smallest ones if there is not enough cost benefits. They might even refund the payments of someone to compensate them.

    If it’s my data, however, I’m not sure that’s good enough. I’m also not sure it’s a risk I want to take.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72146/)

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  • Certified Private Clouds

    Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular, or at least, more and more talked about in the tech press. Like many of you, I am not sure that I want to run my database servers from the cloud, but that might change. I ran across a note that said Microsoft is looking to certify private cloud stacks with a number of vendors, similar to the Fast Track program that they implemented for data warehousing.

    For some time now I’ve felt that to really get large scale adoption of the Azure cloud framework, Microsoft really needed to have a way for corporate IT departments to build and deploy to private, internal “cloud services.” Clouds they could build, expand, and most importantly, secure, according to their own requirements, on their own premises. The idea of trusting a central provider seems foreign to many companies, especially when governments could subpoena your information or the cloud provider could shut down your business. To what extent you are more protected on premises is unclear, but many companies do no want to trust a third party to safeguard their rights.

    The idea of a service that you can deploy to, connect to, and use to abstract your applications away from specific machines is one that makes sense. We constantly build abstraction layers to simplify the interconnections of our systems. The “cloud”, whether public or private, is another extension of this. I know I’d like to be able to manage one large SQL Server cloud, rather than individual machines.

    Actually, it seems like  a lot of the work I’ve done over the years is to try and make all my instances appear as one single group that I can manage together. Kind of my own type of “cloud.”

    Steve Jones

  • Living Moore’s Law

    I’m not much of a hardware geek these days. For the most part I just want my computers to work. Actually if I think about it, I really just want my services to work. I don’t care what specs they have, or the technology used.

    If I went back to managing databases, I would be looking for databases to work on, not individual machines. I think that’s one reason that the idea of cloud database services appeals to me. Not necessarily clouds on the Internet, but as a series of machines in my data center that I could just plug together and have SQL Server run various services across them.

    In reading a little about eBay and their new data center, I think it might be very cool to work there. The director of their data center talks about living Moore’s Law, with the new data center in Utah. While I’m sure many of the large internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, etc. would also be interesting, I’m not sure how many of them are on a two year cycle, replacing all of their systems on a rotating basis.

    I live on a 35 acre ranch, and it’s a lot of work keeping it up. That can help me appreciate the scale of the new eBay data center, which is a 60 acre campus. Their phase one approach has 7.2MW of server load in the building with some racks generating over 30,000W of heat. That’s quite a hot aisle!

    At that pace of change, I have to think that it’s both exciting and a challenge to keep systems running on new hardware and also modifying code to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by hardware changes. It’s a challenge that I would love to tackle at some point in my life.

    Steve Jones