Cloud migration

[wheels]

A buddy gave me a call this morning - his companies IT is a mess and he is tasked with recommending solutions. It 's not a huge company but they work .gov contracts, so that impacts the selection. Anyone have any words of wisdom, pro & con, or experience with the big names?

I've been playing around on Amazon today provisioning servers and such - really can't understand why you wouldn't use cloud based infrastructure if it was an option. Seeing the price per month for a server before you launch has got to be a CIO's dream.

[ExtremeX]

Some things I put in the cloud or use saas services, and some things I don’t…

Sometimes it makes sense from a cost standpoint, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Right now I have SAAS/Cloud hosted exchange, sharepoint, Lync and it’s a lifesaver. But I keep DC and file services in house on my ESXi servers… Amazon Cloud EC2 is cool but I wasn’t going to move DC and file/print services off site… aside from the bandwith hit not having things local, it wasn’t going to save me a bunch of cash.

I still have the ability to provision a desktop and server in minutes with VMWare, so the cloud server options have their place, but it’s not always cost effective.

Cloud server hosting is cool if you need elastic computing power, offsite replication / DR site....

[wheels]

Good info, going to be interesting to see the requirements develop and produce the pro/con matrix for individual services.

I guess the cloud may have changed many aspects of IT, I hadn't considered keeping a some mix of (micro resource) servers online and synchronized in case of a disaster you could just add the needed resources and continue smartly along. Going to need to review the design best practices since I've been out of the loop a little while.

[ExtremeX]

If you want to do a little training... CBT Nuggets has some of the best material around.

Here is one specifically on the migration strat.

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training-videos/course/aws_architecture_cert/10796

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training-videos/course/aws_foundations_cert

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training-videos/course/aws_architecture_cert

[speedrrracer]

We use EC2. We're a small start-up, and hiring IT staff to babysit hardware costs a lot of money which we'd only (probably, not certainly) recoup over the medium term.

Well, we don't know if we'll be around for the medium term, and it takes time and effort to interview & hire IT staff + provision hardware & networks. Also takes space, proper cooling, there's noise, etc. Obv these factors are of the 'YMMV' sort.

PCI compliance is another one. If you've ever been through a PCI audit, you know it's a friggin rectal exam. With the right cloud option, you can slough off some of the burden, because you're not housing the hardware.

These are "trading money for time" factors. We need to get to market yesterday, and if we can trade more money to save time, it's a deal we'll take every day and twice on Sunday. Again, ymmv.

Flexibility is fantastic, obv. Way beyond what you can achieve in-house, but do you need it? If there's intent / hope to develop something which spikes in growth, as opposed to a business plan aiming for steady growth, then cloud might be the call.

Availability is good. It's nice to be able to say I want to run on cloud instances out of (e.g.) the West Coast, but whoa -- there's a power outage and the grid in that city goes down. With the right cloud choice, you can just spin up instances out of that company's East Coast server farm, and you're back up and running (with some minor hiccups, obv). Migrating like that with a different solution could range from just as easy to impossible.

[Peter.Steele]

My company looked recently at migrating to a cloud-based setup, because it would enable them to eliminate the IT department, and save them a couple-three million a year. (We've got 35,000 US employees, there's a few IT bucks being spent there.)

Well, the plan was to hire a company to host a server with virtual machines running and then put a dumb terminal on all the desks, company wide, which would then replace our workstations.

What actually happened was, we kept our workstations.

They discovered that, much as the vendor claimed there would be a seamless integration between a keyboard and monitor on my desk in California and the server in [INSERT EAST COAST STATE HERE], you really can't get past the speed of light. I could type 10-12 words ahead of where the cursor would show, and never mind actually doing any of my 3D design work.

[ocabj]

Outsourcing to a cloud service provider might be a good solution from a technical standpoint, but not from a policy standpoint.

You mentioned the company handles Government contracts.

Well, I'm sure the Government has specific audit requirements for the company in question with regards to the data security of company. Will a cloud solution still allow the company to meet those requirements? What kind of Business Association Agreement will be drafted between your company/organization and the cloud service provider? Where will the liabilities reside with regards to cloud service breaches? Will your company's insurance cover data loss/breach/etc caused by the cloud service provider?

You'll definitely need to get the lawyers involved in this.

[SonofWWIIDI]

Thought this thread was gonna be about clouds flying south for the winter.

[wheels]

My company looked recently at migrating to a cloud-based setup, because it would enable them to eliminate the IT department, and save them a couple-three million a year. (We've got 35,000 US employees, there's a few IT bucks being spent there.)

Well, the plan was to hire a company to host a server with virtual machines running and then put a dumb terminal on all the desks, company wide, which would then replace our workstations.

What actually happened was, we kept our workstations.

They discovered that, much as the vendor claimed there would be a seamless integration between a keyboard and monitor on my desk in California and the server in [INSERT EAST COAST STATE HERE], you really can't get past the speed of light. I could type 10-12 words ahead of where the cursor would show, and never mind actually doing any of my 3D design work.

Interesting - I guess I can only envision terminals in an environment where you only allow your workforce to interact with a single application, and even then you would want to mitigate any geographic issues. Most businesses recognize that a PC has some generic functionality in addition to the major applications that employees use to complete their jobs.

I don't expect his company thinks they can get rid of the entire IT department, I don't see desktop and app support going away.

[stonith3901]

My company looked recently at migrating to a cloud-based setup, because it would enable them to eliminate the IT department, and save them a couple-three million a year. (We've got 35,000 US employees, there's a few IT bucks being spent there.)

Well, the plan was to hire a company to host a server with virtual machines running and then put a dumb terminal on all the desks, company wide, which would then replace our workstations.

What actually happened was, we kept our workstations.

They discovered that, much as the vendor claimed there would be a seamless integration between a keyboard and monitor on my desk in California and the server in [INSERT EAST COAST STATE HERE], you really can't get past the speed of light. I could type 10-12 words ahead of where the cursor would show, and never mind actually doing any of my 3D design work.

Our sister company have animators that work in another country using KVM over IP to workstations runing maya in the datacenter at another location. Its possible to do when the network infrastructure is a 10gb+ ring

[wheels]

Our sister company have animators that work in another country using KVM over IP to workstations runing maya in the datacenter at another location. Its possible to do when the network infrastructure is a 10gb+ ring

Did a little reading, was wondering what protocols they used but didn't see anything. Imagine UDP for the video and TCP for keyboard & mouse control. Latency is the critical issue, I used to work with big data over big pipes moving thousands of miles, if we couldn't keep the latency manageable we had to make use of the protocols available.