Would you like to learn five extremely common cloud computing myths and misconceptions?
If so, this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the Founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects. And we're
an organization that's dedicated towards building high-performance cloud computing and networking
careers. Personally, I've been working in technology for over 25 years now, and I've
been helping others get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for more than two
decades. And that's why we make these videos to help you.
In today's video, we're going to talk about some cloud computing myths and misconceptions.
And if you're a cloud architect, or a solutions architect, or an enterprise architect, you
really need to know these things. And if you're a customer who's considering cloud computing,
this is also essential information for you.
The first myth, and I see this being propagated everywhere, is that the cloud is cheaper.
The cloud may be cheaper than a traditional network and data center, but not always. See,
what's going on is in the network and the data center, we're dealing with predominantly
capital expenses. We've got lots of routers to buy, lots of switches to buy, physical
real estate to buy, big AC's to buy, big servers to buy, big storage to buy. But we buy it
and we buy it once, and we keep it for a couple of years. When we move to the cloud, we rent
everything. So that capital expense becomes much more operational expenses. We're renting
the network, we're renting the virtualized data center, we're renting everything. And,
depending upon the way an organization uses technology, that can be a lot cheaper or much
more expensive.
See, the cloud offers us agility, which is amazing. Look at it this way, I want to set
up a server. In the data center, I call Dell, or Lenovo, or someone, and I order a server.
A couple of weeks later, it arrives. I then rack it into a rack, screw it in, cable it
up, install an operating system on my apps, or install a hypervisor like VMware ESXi,
and then the apps. But we're able to take that process from six weeks to seconds on
the cloud, agility.
Also, on the cloud, while in certain cases it can be cheaper, it is traditionally. Let's
say we've got an e-commerce site, we build for Christmas, the busiest time in the year.
So we may have systems that idle at basically zero or 5% all year long, and then get busy
during Christmas. On the cloud, we can right size what we buy, meaning purchase exactly
what we need, which is great. Meaning we can purchase what we need on average, and then
scale up or out or add capacity as needed for Christmas, for example. So we buy what
we need and only what we need, which again could be cheaper.
But look at the way you pay for services on the cloud. On the cloud, you pay per use.
Off the cloud, you pay to acquire them. So if you build a 100 gig network in your own
environment, in the data center, you pay for the 100 gig network connection, at least in
the US. If you want to have a 100 gig connection to the cloud, you pay for the 100 gig connection,
plus you pay a daily fee to have the connection, and then you pay to use the connection.
Now, in my mind, it's not cheaper. That's three ways it can be more expensive. So as
the cloud architect, as the solution architect, it's up for you to do a business case, to
look at what is the best thing for your customer. And you know what? It's going to be, in most
cases, a combination between the cloud, the data center, and you can always do what's
in your best customer's interest. But take all of these factors, shifting from CapEx
to OpEx could be a good thing. It could be a really horrible thing. And it's up to you,
the architect, who's half business executive and half technology professional, to go figure
it out. So the cloud could be cheaper. It may not be cheaper, but just don't assume
it is. Do the calculations and you will do right by your customers.
The next one is, the cloud is green. I ask every student when they come to me, "Why do
you work on a cloud? Why would you desire to be a cloud architect?" And a lot of them
say, "Because it's green." And I say, "Tell me how the cloud's green." And they say, "The
company doesn't buy any more servers." And I say, "Great. Who buys the servers instead?"
And they say, "I don't know." I say, "The cloud provider buys those same servers." So
if you need a 100,000 servers in your data center and you go to the cloud, that cloud
provider will have to buy those same 100,000 servers.
So, I don't see how that's greener. Now, in certain cases, there's cloud providers that
have their own solar power. And if the case, that is green. But remember the laws of thermodynamics,
energy cannot be created nor destroyed, just merely transformed. So, if you're not in your
data center, but it's running in somebody else's data center, there's no green benefit.
It's the same number of servers just somewhere else.
Now there is a touch of truth, and it is very small, in that the cloud providers and basically
service providers in general, basically oversubscribe. In that the service providers can assume that
not everybody is going to use their servers at full capacity or the network at full capacity.
So basically speaking, the service provider will build less capacity than their total
number of customers and assume the customers aren't using it all at the same time. So there's
a little bit of green there, but for the most part, remember anything that was in your data
center must be purchased by the cloud provider. And, therefore, it's the same amount of energy
use. It's just where the energy is located. Your data center versus theirs.
The concept of, all I need is a single cloud, I just outsource it and it's all done automatically.
Well, very common myth, but let's talk about the actual facts. If you have one car and
it breaks down, you're in trouble. If you have one tire on a car and it breaks, you're
in trouble because you've got nothing that's going to roll at all. Now granted this way
of four tires, I had a spare. You always have a spare. If you were to build your network
on a single service provider and that single service provider went down, you'd be down.
No one builds a network across just a single service provider. Everyone designs a network
across multiple service providers because everybody has outages.
And if, for example, you built your network with AT&T and Verizon, two exceptionally good
service providers. And if you are only on AT&T and AT&T had an outage, you are down.
And if you were only on Verizon and they had an outage, you are down. Instead, organizations
end up building their networks across two providers or three providers. And that way
they know that any outage happens anywhere, anytime.
Look, you saw it last week. Facebook had a massive outage. Why did Facebook have an outage?
Because of a misconfiguration of BGP, one of the routing protocols. This happens all
the time across cloud providers. There's going to be DDoS attacks. There's going to be hacking.
And there's going to be service providers that make mistakes. So protect yourself. You
can't do a single cloud. You must use multiple clouds. You wouldn't do it in the network.
You wouldn't have the single data center and you shouldn't have a single cloud. So, as
a cloud architect realize you're going to have to have a hybrid cloud solution. Meaning
a hybrid cloud, meaning a private cloud has a public cloud or multiple public clouds.
High availability means no single points of failure. Single cloud provider is a single
point of failure. When we come to high availability, we deal with the military outage. One is one,
one is none. Two is one and three is greater than two. So always have more than one and
you will be high availability.
The cloud is inherently secure. There are so many people that think they can just go
to the cloud and security doesn't matter anymore because the cloud is secure. No, the cloud
is just like any other network or data center. In fact, it is just a network and a data center.
And what you access is just a virtualized version of that network and data center. But
the cloud is less secure. People are going to hate me for saying this. The cloud is less
secure. If you are a hacker, who are you going to hack? One business or every business? If
you hack the cloud because the cloud is such a high value target, you hack everybody, because
everybody's on the cloud. If you hack a single business, you hack a single business. So where
are hackers going to put their time, their effort, their money, and their computing power?
To hack the cloud, and they do it all the time.
So, the cloud by nature of being a high value target, is going to be inherently less secure.
Plus in the data center, you can use hardware security appliances. If you want to hire a
bunch of Navy SEALs that are armed to protect your data center for security, you can. If
you want to have Layer 2 Security, 802. Linux Mac address on authentication, for example,
you can. If you want to use QoS in case a worm or a virus gets on your systems and you
want to deprioritize it on your own systems, you can.
You can't do any of this cool security on the cloud. And on the cloud, you can't walk
up to the card provider with your firewall on rocket, they're your hardware device. So
on the cloud, you're going to have to use virtualized security appliances that are going
to run on virtual machines. And you're going to have to do a little bit of chaos and a
little bit of engineering to make it work. Whether using network load balancers, or gateway
load balancers to your firewalls. There's a lot of work arounds to the inherent things
of the cloud. So the cloud is just as secure or can be just as secure if all things were
equal, but the cloud is a high value target. If I was a hacker, I would focus much more
on hacking the cloud than I would on any single customer, because by getting into that cloud,
I get into everybody's.
So make sure that you design an end-to-end solution. Don't think you can get away with
less security on the cloud. You can't, you need more security in the cloud than you did
in the data center, because you have less control. Do this, and your systems will be
secure. Again, the cloud is amazing and it's truly transformational. We just want you to
know the right way to do things.
Now, the last part of this, again, is another myth. Organizations think, "Guess what? I
found the cloud architect, I'm going to take everything to the cloud." Well, again, this
is one of those things that doesn't make sense. Let's think about it architecturally speaking.
What goes to the cloud and where does the cloud really shine? The cloud really shines
where you've got, Auto Scaling, basically web applications that are kind of grow on
demand. The cloud is amazing here. The cloud is really great when you've got to connect
to a lot of partner organizations that are already on the cloud, because you don't even
need to build a network that way. It's so easy.
The cloud is amazing, but the cloud is different. In the data center, you can get much greater
disk performance. You can easily get 5 million IOPS with an NVMe Raider and a physical server
in your data center. You can't get anything like that on the cloud. And that's okay, because
how often do you really need 5 million IOPS? Not very often.
Also let's assume you start moving to the cloud to get the advantages, the scalability
of the cloud. Really great things. Does that mean you should take your legacy applications
that are working perfectly on your servers that are a hundred percent paid for and move
them to the cloud?
No, that doesn't make sense. What's the cost to run your applications on fully paid for
it servers? Not a lot, electricity. What's the cost to move them to the cloud? A whole
lot. And then you have to pay for every minute or every second, depending upon how you're
build on the cloud provider. So it's about doing the right things. What problems are
you trying to solve? What are those business problems and what are the technologies that
are best?
Sometimes it's the network. Sometimes it's the data center, but guess what? You're a
cloud architect or solution architect. You don't have to choose, keep what's in the network.
What's supposed to be in the network. Keep some of the data where its supposed to be.
Offload things to the cloud, refactor things through the cloud, leverage the cloud for
what it is. The cloud is an incredibly scalable, highly agile, virtualized network in the data
center that can truly transform business with speed and agility.
So if you're an architect, go be an architect and go help those organizations succeed. Just
know that some of these things are very true and some of these things are not true. And
here's the key, when you're an architect, you will have the wisdom and the judgment
and the know-how to do so, but just don't read in a book that says the cloud is cheaper,
and assume it is. Just don't think you can get away with a single cloud because you couldn't
get away with it before, and you still can't get away with it. Don't think that you don't
need security. Take all the architectural principles that go into good network design
and good data center design, apply them to the cloud, which is just a network and a data
center that's been virtualized and you will be successful. Your cloud migrations will
be successful and your customers will achieve great things which will make your customer
satisfied and build your cloud architect brand and boost your cloud architect career.
We've covered five and the most common cloud computing myths and misconceptions. I hope
you've enjoyed this video. This is Michael Gibbs. I'm the Founder and CEO of Go Cloud
Architects. We're here to help you in every way, build your cloud computing career. Thank
you so much. And I look forward to seeing you in another video.
It was so nice having you join us for this video today. Let me tell you about some free
services we do for the cloud community. Twice per week we have a free, "How to get your
first cloud architect job" webinar, where we tell you all the things you need to do,
and know, to get your first cloud architect job. In addition to that, once per week, we
actually have a free question and answer session on, live on YouTube, where you can come and
ask us any questions you want about building your career related to cloud computing or
networking and we'll answer them in real time for you because we want to get you to your
goals.
Several more times per week, we have guests from industry, industry experts that I've
known for decades that are movers and shakers that have changed the world, that can give
you information so you can build the best career. I invite them periodically. They are
on my show. If there's a chance to do some free training on our channel, we'll do it
live because we want you to all have the best skills for the best career. So please subscribe
and hit the bell. I look forward to seeing you and I look forward to assisting you in
your technology career. Thank you so much. This is Michael Gibbs from Go Cloud Architects.