Myths about infrastructure in the cloud: what kind of illiteracy we face in Russia every day

My name is Alexander, and I, among other things, am engaged in communicating with those who have just learned about the clouds. And he wants to transfer part of his infrastructure there. Most often, these are productions not from Moscow, which just recently learned about virtualization as such.

In half the cases, these are not the most developed guys in IT. Some live in the last century. Friends come to them, they say that there are cloud providers. Then begins communication with us.

My favorite episode is the miscalculation of prices for new equipment in the office (a rack from servers of a cheap segment or converted PCs) and clouds:

- So. Hypervisor License Why pay for it? We never bought a license ... Russia, hehe! Support for iron in the rack? To hell, we’ll manage without support, we have an admin fumble. What else, backup? We already have a singe ...

There is also a popular myth that if the server is in the office, then when the check comes, you can take it and pour boiling water from the kettle, and then no one will take the data. It is so widespread that sometimes it seems to me that the domestic market of low-end servers directly rests on it.

How the company understands that you need to take a closer look at the cloud

It's about two things: money or responsibility.

Everything is obvious with money: transferring infrastructure to a cloud provider allows you to save money. Almost everyone understands this. True, they usually think about it at the moment when something breaks. The financial director recalls the words “financial responsibility” and conducts his calculation. He sees that the service costs 7 million, and the same inside the company - 10 million a year. Plus there is financial responsibility at the SLA level.

Another responsibility is the question of who will be responsible for the infrastructure, except for the admin or CIO / CTO. Very often, if a business gets up due to IT breakdowns, this is the problem of the IT manager. The fact that he said two years ago that it would be nice to buy a couple of hard drives in the server in place of worn-out RAIDs, or that he insisted on including hardware support in the budget, but they did not give him money, these are frequent stories.

It turns out that he was deprived of risk control tools, and responsibility for these risks was left.

Therefore, the request most often comes either from the financial director, or from the head of the IT department. Both roughly represent what they want, but clarification is needed at the meeting. Then the following happens: they tell us what kind of needs are, and we are trying to translate this into a kind of technical requirements and roughly calculate. At this stage of the discussion, what and who needs it, a person who can talk with people, understands the needs of the business and at the same time understands the technique, is surely involved. As a rule, this is a former engineer who developed along the branch of organizational skills. Its functionality is analytics: talked and found out the needs. I thought how to close these needs with our solutions. He formulated a closing proposal and has already presented, presented, justified, proved why it is correct.

Then the stage “Why are you a good company?” Begins. In fact, this question is also about responsibility, or rather, about its transfer to a large company. This is such an additional informal, but very important argument. Because if something breaks! and the contractor is small, this is one. And if something breaks and the contractor is large, it is no longer a jamb of the head, but practically force majeure. It looks like this: “I found a big company, it provides a service. If she messes up, it must be dryuch, and not me. They were selected by the competition commission based on factors ... ". It is clear that all the same, the leader, in case of downtime, is grunted, but the corporate world is so arranged that a large contractor is punished much less. Because the fault is as if on external circumstances. It’s like when the main provider drops the channels once again, it’s not the IT specialist to blame,

And then, in the process of agreeing on a proposal, we inevitably begin to analyze myths.

Myths

1. We take the Mercedes “Gelentvagen” and put on it half of the spare parts from the UAZ. Including brake pads. In order to save on individual components. It turns out a great car model "Gelentoisen." We roughly call configurations where everything is fine with respect to computing resources, but for a DBMS, disks are taken right up to speed: those that are usually designed for archival storage or storage of "cold" data. I don’t know what kind of alchemy is acting in the head of a number of people, but the decrease in the configuration precisely on the DBMS at the last moment to reduce the overall estimate is a common case. The Gelentoisen looks like a cool car from the outside, but it cannot slow down. With a DBMS, the story is reversed. It can brake.
2. Often the customer comes and says that he has important data. And he needs certification in a certain class. For example, 1K each. And rolls out the requirements for such an infrastructure. Firstly, 1K has not been used for many years. Secondly, it may well turn out that he has data of the third category, and he simply does not know about it, because someone is either incompetent or does not know how to draw up documents correctly, or decided to play it safe. It happens that a lawyer is armed with a set of myths and confidently defends them.
3. Scaling speed. There are two more types of customers who do not always know how to calculate the cost of iron. These are research institutes and retail. Retail has large seasonal peaks, for which it is not always ready even at the level of the site. And the research institute has projects with a big miscalculation. For example, they can take geological exploration for a month, and for another three months their iron in the rack will be idle. Therefore, the findirector also begins to look at recycling and grabs his head. Many still have peaks: on payment aggregators, on transporters in the season. And, if they are, you should always think about the fact that instead of buying new iron, it might be worthwhile to consider partial migration. These same companies have a very long planning step. Iron is bought for 3 months, and sometimes it is needed right yesterday. But no: 2 weeks - analysis, 2 months - tender, month - contracting. Then delivery. If you are lucky, commissioned - after 3 months. But not all are so experienced. In the cloud, many things are being done at the level of "today a letter of guarantee - tomorrow deployed twice as many virtual machines." Naturally, this is not the case everywhere. If you need to double the capacity, not everyone is ready to work on a warranty. It is better to find out this question in advance.
4. Small and medium-sized businesses assume that when inspection bodies come, the safest is the pantry, where the counter stands, and a kettle boils nearby or a fire hammer lies. Further, the server is filled with water, or the hard disk is shattered. In such cases, we simply show 30 mashrooms, each with 100 racks. Guess where the cloud is, and what specific racks are specific to your data? And how to endure them so as not to drop someone’s banking or IT of a state-owned enterprise? Separating where exactly whose is physically impossible. And to remove everything at once - an incident of a national scale. And yet, even if suddenly someone takes everything out of the equipment that you pulled out, you still need to collect something working. And this, most likely, will fail.
5. “You will not give my data.” If any one customer, even a small bakery with a check of 5 thousand rubles a month, suddenly someday won’t be able to take the data, or we will steal it, or lose it, or put it in the public domain, or we will merge it with someone, or otherwise we discredit us, as a cloud provider, khan. It is impossible to hide the fakap if you are a public service provider. Therefore, you make efforts so that it is not there. Well, immediately about the level of intervention: we do not go further than the hypervisor in principle, that is, we don’t even know if the customer has licensed OSs or not. And do not have to know. And do not ask.

Testing, rake and conclusions

Before confirming the start of the project, the customer usually begins to be actively interested in other enterprises from related fields: they call up, change their impressions, hit each other in the liver with expensive alcohol, exchange their sincere impressions and take the minimum set for tests. Some immediately take everything because they rightly assume that the greater our coverage for services, the more comprehensive the responsibility, and the easier it is to ask us for obligations.

Here, it seems, they agreed on everything, asked all the questions, got the answers - it's time to start the test implementation. Here mid-level performers come on the stage, who have a completely different motivation and a way of acting, different from the tops.

The biggest "setup" at this stage: it happens that the CIO wants, but his subordinates do not. Because there were 50 IT specialists, and after the move 30 will remain. The cloud to some extent replaces their work, and they are afraid of losing it. And then traditional sticks in wheels begin. Alas, the fact that after the transition to cloud infrastructure begins to reduce, it is a fact.

Here I can not resist the digression. In my opinion, the advanced approach that is usually characteristic of Western companies, when the IT department is not just something like cleaners, but a full-fledged business unit , is a big leap in the market of virtualization providers. Why? Because two factors:

1. The IT department bills internal departments, and in the cloud it can tell exactly who consumed resources and how much (with the exception of routing resources such as payment for VM routers, but this is a few percent).
2. CIOs have tasks to increase business efficiency. Or increase control. They even have goals in the money from business: reducing risks, moving to the guardianship, increasing labor productivity. Therefore, immediately all the money saved and non-working risks increase the premium, and it can be 2-3 annual salary, if all is well. Therefore, the most efficient use of capacities immediately begins.

Well, the last myth is that the cloud is a must. No, not always: there are tasks when everything is solved precisely by the desk in the office. Or there are companies whose budgeting is such that it is easier to lay down the purchase of iron every 3 years and support immediately, rather than operating costs. Well, and, of course, there are people who have always lived on physical hardware and simply do not want to take something beyond the perimeter of the organization: their racks are also important for them. Somewhere on the border of these tasks is a layer of myths, and these myths are sometimes quite actively fueled by server vendors.

The text was prepared by Alexander Kuznetsov, Head of Strategic Sales Management, Technoserv Cloud .