Re: [PLUG] Topic for North (cloud stuff)

["Lee H. Marzke" <lee@marzke.net>]

My use case for Amazon EC2,  was that I have a few Linux and/or freeBSD VM's running
locally on VMware,  and I'd like somewhere else to run them if/when I need to
bring down my cluster for maintenance,  typically no more than a few hours or days
at a time.     EC2 is attractive to run a workload for a few hours/days only.

Not many cloud sites support uploading your own VM,  until recently I though that
EC2 wasn't a good candidate because you can lose all your data when the instance
goes down.  Amazon tells you all the time any changes in the running instance may
be lost if the instance goes down because the storage is ephemeral.

Turns out that new EC2 AMI images now use persistent EBS storage for their
root volume instead of ephemeral storage,  and they now have a newish 'migration service'
that will allow upload of running VMware VM's,  so they appear to be supporting
more non-cloud native VM's, and they now provide snapshot pictures of the console
screen, but still don't give you full console or keyboard access.

So this works for me running a VM for a short time,  but full migration to cloud
would be risky for me without console access to fix these non-cloud designed VM's.


Lee


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vossen JP" <jp@jpsdomain.org>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:43:58 PM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Topic for North (cloud stuff)

> On 02/05/2018 02:33 PM, Andy Wojnarek wrote:
>> The lack of the console has always puzzled me – but they really make a
>> lot of effort into making sure that you’re managing your
>> business/infrastructure the ‘cloud way.’ Their whole shtick (and
>> reflected in their certs) is that EC2 should not be treated a colo where
>> you lift-and-shift workloads and forget about them. They express that if
>> you do everything the ‘cloud way’, and utilize their services, and
>> architect correctly – you reduce the amount of people and time you spend
>> on your infrastructure and more time on your business.
> 
> I don't know much about cloud stuff in general or AWS in particular, but
> it seems like there are 2 really high-level ways to use it/them.
> 
> 
> There's a saying that "there is no such thing as the cloud, there is
> only someone else's data center."  And that's the first one, you are
> just renting VMs, and lots of infrastructure and management around them,
> in someone else's data center.
> 
> There are arguments that's a bad idea, for example:
> 
> http://www.backupcentral.com/addressing-spectre-meltdown-in-your-backup-system/
> (emphasis his) [1]
>	...taking a product designed for physical nodes in a datacenter and
> installing it in VMs in the cloud is a perfect example of how *not* to
> use the cloud.
> 
> 
> The other way is to simply assemble "cloud" services into the thing you
> need, taking advantage of the scale and resiliency of the service and
> not simply running your own nodes someone else's data center.  The
> example of that which comes to mind is Troy Hunt's
> https://haveibeenpwned.com/ site, which is, I'm pretty sure, built in
> Azure without any "nodes" at all.  He'd detailed a lot about how that
> all works in his blog, here are 2 at least somewhat relevant posts but
> there are others I don't have time to search for right now:
> *
> https://www.troyhunt.com/microsoft-flow-azure-storage-webjobs-outlook-email/
> *
> https://www.troyhunt.com/one-million-subscribers-later-heres-the-state-of-have-i-been-pwned/
> 
> 
> I'll repeat that I don't know much about cloud stuff, so maybe I'm all
> wrong, but this is at least a place to start.  And probably real life is
> some mix of both of those anyway.
> 
> 
> So, fodder for discussion,
> JP
> 
> [1] Backup Central is an interesting site by the guy who wrote the
> O'Reilly Backup book (which is very good).  He recently went to work for
> a cloud backup provider, so he's now somewhat more inclined to look at
> the cloud perspective.  But it's an interesting quote.
> 
> --  -------------------------------------------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 
IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM 
+1 800-393-5217 office 
+1 484-348-2230 fax
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