Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • The PASS Pro Videos are Live

    The PASS Pro program was an interesting educational opportunity that came out last year. A number of people subscribed, including me. I did this more to support the org than for the content, but I did want to watch the videos and learn some new skills.

    When Redgate Software purchased the assets, this was one of the first things we wanted to release. The process took a couple weeks, but you can now access the materials for free.

    All the courses were added to the Redgate University, as this was the easiest way to organize them on our side. You watch each of these for free:

    You can now work through these courses, without the quiz gates, and just view the material.

    I do hope we get the quizzes live, but for now, you can access these for free.

  • All In to the Cloud

    I was listening to the fall 2020 GroupBy conference recently and heard Gethyn Ellis note that he wasn’t aware of any companies that were over some age (a decade?), and that had made a 100% move to the cloud. The comment caught my eye, not because I haven’t felt the same way, but because I’d just heard from a company that surprised me.

    During the DevOps Enterprise Summit recently, one of the keynotes was from Capital One. They are a 26 year old company that is focused on financial services, and they said that this year they are 100% in the cloud. They recently shut down their last data center. For a highly regulated company, and one that’s not a startup, that is impressive.

    Almost all customers that I talk with are looking at the cloud in some sense. They might not be looking to move their biggest or most important applications, or even a majority, but they are often looking to hedge their bets, while they continue depreciating or using their on-premises assets for some period of time.

    Not so with Capital One. They have heavily embraced DevOps, flexibility and rapid change in a way that had them open their 8th data center in 2014, only to pivot and look to eliminate that part of their infrastructure. They believe there is sufficient capability, reliability, and perhaps most importantly, security, in the cloud providers. They’ve embraced cloud-first, after an initial lift-and-shift approach for their thousands of systems.

    I don’t know that most companies need to move in this direction, but this does show it is possible, and no matter what your concerns are, there are models of enterprises that have found ways to take advantage of the cloud and that you can look to emulate..

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Next Evolution of Big Blue

    When I was a kid, IBM built typewriters. I actually had one and produced some schoolwork on it. At some point I learned they were a force in large computing. Then they entered the PC market, and eventually the Thinkpad laptops were coveted items. Later I encountered them when a large company I worked for was looking at outsourcing our IT service for Big Blue to run.

    In over a 100 years, IBM has thrived, despite ups and downs, and re-invented themselves many times. Early in my career, lots of managers used IBM hardware and software, with the adage that “no one gets fired for buying IBM.” Whether it was the best fit or not, it was hard to get in trouble for using what many others had chosen.

    I haven’t heard a lot about IBM lately, but wasn’t surprised to see this article about them spinning off the managed services part of their business. I think that has always been a low margin business, though surprisingly a successful one. It made Ross Perot a very rich man.

    However, with the cloud world, margins are higher. The cloud isn’t necessarily cheaper for businesses. They pay more to have flexibility, less up front capital expenditure, and less commitment. While IBM doesn’t often come up when talking about AWS, Azure, and GCP, it’s listed as one of the top 5.

    I don’t know if it will catch the others, but I do know more and more companies are looking to cloud and hybrid infrastructure, and I would bet IBM will have lots of success here.

    Steve Jones

  • Beating the Cloud Vendors

    I find the cloud in 2020 to be very interesting. I run into plenty of technical professionals that still dismiss it or think that moving to the cloud is a recipe for disaster. They are sure their internal systems are better, more cost effective, and better built than anything a cloud vendor can sell their organization.

    They might be right. I do think that this can be true.

    I also think that the cloud is a fairly unstoppable trend for the world, so you better be able to answer Brent’s question: what do you do better than the cloud? Even if your company isn’t planning on moving or pushing you to think about it, this could be a good exercise. In fact, it might be a fun team building exercise over lunch or on a late Friday afternoon when things are slow.

    It does mean that you need to learn something about the cloud, which is a very nebulous term. There are IaaS and PaaS services, lots of networking options, plenty of automated tasks built in and even more services available that you might ever want to install. There is also very confusing pricing, limited hardware choices, and a feature mix that could be different from what’s available on premises.

    The cloud gives you lots of flexibility in some ways, and little in others. Vendors provide certifications and instrumentation and logging that you might not want to build. Or maybe you’ve built it already. What equipment or contracts that you have might not be cost effective to change now, but when you think about renewing or replacing them, you might have a much different view.

    I can almost guarantee that your management, especially finance, will think about this differently than you do.

    Depending on what I’m doing, I think the cloud is either amazing or maddening. Some of that is me, and some is truly the cloud and how I use it. You can beat the cloud vendors, but you might not want to. If you do, be prepared to prove it.

    Steve Jones