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Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
Welcome to The Cloud Thread! WOOOSH



This is the thread for all things cloud related. The popular Cloud-to-butt addon/extension is highly recommended for reading this thread.

What's a cloud? Well, it means different things to different people, but most agree whatever it is, it's the wave of the future.

:ubisoft: Cloud Philosophy from the outside:

It's goddamned magic. When non-tech or news people talk about "The Cloud", they generally mean a managed service that lives somewhere out on the internet and is managed and supported by someone who is not them. Often, a space techno-wizard. Remote storage (Dropbox, iDrive, Google Drive, Backblaze) are examples of personal cloud services. This is generally called a "SaaS" offering (see below). Companies pay a subscription and receive a product and don't really have to deal with purchasing hardware/software and hiring talented people to manage that hardware/software. They get to leverage economies of scale and just "rent" an IT department or business solution instead. There are lots of buzzwords that live in this space and people still coming up with new ways of framing it - "Utility model", "Service-oriented architecture", "OPEX over CAPEX", but it all boils down to basically outsourcing your hardware, infrastructure group, or software product. It generally comes in 3 forms:
  • SaaS - Software as a Service - Provides a service hosted online for your use - most offerings have subscription fees (or are ad-supported). All Remote Storage, Microsoft's 360 stuff, Gmail, and NetFlix are examples of this.
  • Paas - Platform as a Service - Provides a web framework for your use - generally a database, app server, and webserver combo, where you hook your code in and don't have to care about performance or allocating resources - it's done for you. Azure, App Engine, and AWS are examples of this.
  • IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service - Provides remote virtual machines for you to do whatever you want on, generally using VMware or Xen hypervisors. Pretty much gives you a root prompt and an internet-connected server running linux or windows. Amazon, IBM, VMware all have offerings in this space.
All you need is a credit card and an internet connection and the world is your oyster.

:yayclod: Cloud Philosophy from the inside:

It's not magic, it's a barely functional frankenstein's monster that shambles along, held together with duct-tape APIs and liquor-fueled scripting binges. A "Cloud Aware" application means making your application fault tolerant, multi-tenant, and able to elastically expand and contract with demand. Generally this is is a design decision baked in at the most fundamental level of an application, and accomplished by interfacing with the underlying cloud layer's API and being "aware" of it's state and able to adjust itself to continue functioning. Most applications cannot be retrofitted to behave this way and deploying a non-cloud application into the cloud makes for some funny headlines - no cloud service is completely reliable, and at least one region of a cloud provider may go down at any time, even if the overall service remains operational. Software needs to be designed to handle it. Most can't. If you've got "Cloud" or "Software" in your job title it's your role to keep stuff running just long enough to find a new job where the poorly-architected house of cards isn't your problem anymore.

One large benefit of being "in the cloud" is you can pretty much do what you need to do from anywhere. Like an easy chair at the beach. Or a casino. Or a farm in the middle of nowhere. Plus, companies don't have to pay city rates. It's a win-win for both sides, assuming you can deal with the stir-crazies and all that WFH entails.

:yaycloud: Public Cloud:

So you want to get a webhost for your blog or host your new killer startup app that's totally going to disrupt some industry or whatever. You need to get yourself some public cloud. Even your grandma has heard of major "Public Cloud" offerings at this point, and some examples are listed just above. Just pull out your CC and you can be the next Zuckerburg. Or, use iTunes. Or Netflix. Or Steam. It's pervasive and pretty much everywhere at this point.

Many major companies are pushing their own, from IBM to Oracle, where you can buy whatever products you are already buying from these companies, but WOOOSH in the cloud and also you get to pay a monthly fee instead of a yearly subscription oh and your data is sitting on their servers so good luck migrating off of them if you don't like their service in the future.

:nsacloud: Private Cloud:

So some C-level, in an astounding act of hubris, has decided they're going to roll their own cloud, with blackjack and hookers, for whatever business reason sounds convincing at the time. Probably because they liked the cloud idea (not having to be responsible for things, instant provisioning) but also realized they have PII or PCI data that can't be put onto the internet without the media noticing. Warning: Bumpy road ahead. Companies are falling all over themselves to offer products that provide cloud-like functionality on traditional hardware residing in a datacenter under your control. It's a wildly shifting space at the moment and most products are terrible and horribly expensive in money or time-to-configure. This will exist in one form or another, but it's likely half the products on this list will be DoA within 5 years - who knows which half!
  • Openstack
  • Cloudfoundry
  • Cloudstack
  • Eucalyptus
There are probably others. Openstack is the "leader" at the moment. Only the largest businesses need apply, and forget the credit card - bring a PO for several million to even get off the ground.

:smithcloud: Hybrid Cloud:

Hybrid cloud is the bard of cloud offerings. It tries to be the jack of all trades and ends up being all around mediocre. Some products such as RedHat's CloudForms and some of VMWare's more esoteric offerings live in this space because they technically can be pointed at any supported infrastructure, local or remote, and manage it all (given appropriate connectivity). They lay on top of whatever stack you've got and so are somewhat agnostic, as long as you have one of a handful of supported platforms.

What all this means for you

Basically, there are lots of jobs with cloud in the title and it's growing every day. Like it or not, it's where tech is headed; you don't have to like it but you need to be at least familiar with it. Some lucky people will be able to make a lot of money before this poo poo crashes and burns, is replaced with something worse, or when the singularity / rapture / judgement day finally hits.

Bhodi fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Feb 20, 2015

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Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

fluppet
Feb 10, 2009
Dropping several grand a day on infrastructure is fun

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
Roll call, who's bought into any of this, and for how much? Spill your shame here.

MagnumOpus
Dec 7, 2006

Bhodi posted:

Roll call, who's bought into any of this, and for how much? Spill your shame here.

Couple years back my team built a multi-DC private cloud with VMWare ESXi for infrastructure and a combination of Chef and in-house microservices supplying the platform layer. For sure the coolest thing I ever did but also the source of most of my gray hairs.

Zaepho
Oct 31, 2013

Bhodi posted:

Roll call, who's bought into any of this, and for how much? Spill your shame here.

I'm with a Systems Integrator that is a Microsoft Gold Partner in Datacenter, Desktop and Cloud (or whatever those competencies are called). I've done a half dozen or so "Private Cloud" implementations for 24+ physical hosts. I've done a couple Hybrid Cloud Proof Of Concept projects as well. So my shame is in getting paid to build this crap for other companies and then backing away slowly.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Bhodi posted:

Roll call, who's bought into any of this, and for how much? Spill your shame here.
Through no fault of my own, I've touched almost every major cloud technology in a real production or pre-production capacity in the last 18 months. AWS, Google Compute Engine, SoftLayer, OpenStack, and all the supporting tooling that goes along with it. (No Azure yet.) On the one hand, :suicide:. On the other hand, I've got a pretty solid perspective by now on what the strengths and weaknesses are of all these platforms relative to one another. I'll do a writeup soon.

MagnumOpus posted:

Couple years back my team built a multi-DC private cloud with VMWare ESXi for infrastructure and a combination of Chef and in-house microservices supplying the platform layer.
"Hand-fed cattle."

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Feb 20, 2015

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Thanks for this thread, I will be watching it intently. My employer is about to rack a bunch of servers in a DC to run hosted services on top of vSphere and I can't help but think they're a decade out of date with how they should be approaching this sort of problem.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Thanks Ants posted:

Thanks for this thread, I will be watching it intently. My employer is about to rack a bunch of servers in a DC to run hosted services on top of vSphere and I can't help but think they're a decade out of date with how they should be approaching this sort of problem.

Not necessarily. As it has been said, if your applications aren't designed for cloud elasticity then there really isn't a need to jump off the deep end into cloud.

MagnumOpus
Dec 7, 2006

Misogynist posted:

"Hand-fed cattle."

Stealing this.

high six
Feb 6, 2010
I think a lot of it needlessly complicates things where it doesn't need to be used and causes a lot of unneeded issues.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Zaepho posted:

So my shame is in getting paid to build this crap for other companies and then backing away slowly.

My shame is in building the software that companies buy, only to find out that they don't really want the cloud in the first place.

orange sky
May 7, 2007

high six posted:

I think a lot of it needlessly complicates things where it doesn't need to be used and causes a lot of unneeded issues.

Welcome to the IT party!

MagnumOpus
Dec 7, 2006

high six posted:

I think a lot of it needlessly complicates things where it doesn't need to be used and causes a lot of unneeded issues.

This could be said about any poorly-considered operational expenditure or architectural decision. If your computing needs are mostly big ERP applications with a ton of vendor-supported data sources cloud is probably not in your future. However there are use cases where some cloud concepts are the right solutions architecture: a SaaS company with unpredictable usage patterns, scientific orgs that can make use of on-demand Hadoop clusters, etc.

Some of the enterprises sprinting to the cloud are certainly doing so prematurely and for the wrong reasons. Many more severely underestimate the development effort and, I think more importantly, development philosophy shifts that are required to make cloud actually work for you. But for a great many common scenarios some form of cloud architecture is absolutely worth at least doing a proof of.

high six
Feb 6, 2010

MagnumOpus posted:

This could be said about any poorly-considered operational expenditure or architectural decision. If your computing needs are mostly big ERP applications with a ton of vendor-supported data sources cloud is probably not in your future. However there are use cases where some cloud concepts are the right solutions architecture: a SaaS company with unpredictable usage patterns, scientific orgs that can make use of on-demand Hadoop clusters, etc.

Some of the enterprises sprinting to the cloud are certainly doing so prematurely and for the wrong reasons. Many more severely underestimate the development effort and, I think more importantly, development philosophy shifts that are required to make cloud actually work for you. But for a great many common scenarios some form of cloud architecture is absolutely worth at least doing a proof of.

Oh, I am sure it is.

As a background thing, I got my first IT job about six months ago at a MSP that provides cloud services and whatnot in addition to the normal tech support/engineering sorta thing. We mainly work with healthcare companies, and a great many of these have very complicated setups for what I think could be done much simpler. Maybe I'm just missing something because of my experience, but it does make my job a whole lot harder than it has to be, I think.

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

Bhodi posted:

Roll call, who's bought into any of this, and for how much? Spill your shame here.

"Runs many core production services on OpenStack" guy checking in :catdrugs: Our OpenStack guru actually just gave his resignation today, so this should be fun. I understand how our environment works but not quite at his level, so, woohoo?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Docjowles posted:

"Runs many core production services on OpenStack" guy checking in :catdrugs: Our OpenStack guru actually just gave his resignation today, so this should be fun. I understand how our environment works but not quite at his level, so, woohoo?
Because Reasons, I'm looking at OpenStack AZs that are half a blade chassis wide. We're gonna be drinking heavily over the Internet at each other.

high six posted:

I think a lot of it needlessly complicates things where it doesn't need to be used and causes a lot of unneeded issues.
On the other hand, a decent PaaS (like Cloud Foundry if you insist on hosting it yourself) does a really terrific job of keeping you from having to maintain thousands of unique VM instances just because everyone wants to run some stupid pet PHP image gallery or equivalently dumb app. So, yeah, it's about using the right tool for the job. Cloud infrastructures give you a truck full of new tools.

What's really transformative about cloud-computing technology is that it empowers all the different departments of the business to leverage code and automation in whatever way is valuable to them, without being bottlenecked by a central IT department that's getting pulled in fifty different directions by forty different departments. It frees up IT to be a strategic partner for the business, rather than just a cost center. For most applications outside core LoB, this is more important than five-nines uptime.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Feb 20, 2015

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Docjowles posted:

"Runs many core production services on OpenStack" guy checking in :catdrugs: Our OpenStack guru actually just gave his resignation today, so this should be fun. I understand how our environment works but not quite at his level, so, woohoo?

Hey, it's not that complicated! Unless you have to try to figure out messaging problems, in which case :suicide:

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I understand the pet vs cattle distinction, but presumably you need a system to deploy the cattle and manage the configuration templates centrally as well as keeping track of how healthy your cattle are. Are those systems considered pets or are we now seeing projects emerging that amount to cattle managing cattle?

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug

Thanks Ants posted:

I understand the pet vs cattle distinction, but presumably you need a system to deploy the cattle and manage the configuration templates centrally as well as keeping track of how healthy your cattle are. Are those systems considered pets or are we now seeing projects emerging that amount to cattle managing cattle?
It really depends. Some systems have a way of making new instances of themselves programatically, some don't. It's always faster to hand-install it once and and people don't bother looping back to automate the install, especially if you aren't growing and don't have a pressing need for scaling.

Or, if the system is particularly complex, some elements can be automated, some can't or haven't been. Like, the database piece and initial configuration is manual but bringing up additional workers to handle load is automated.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Bhodi posted:

Or, if the system is particularly complex, some elements can be automated, some can't or haven't been. Like, the database piece and initial configuration is manual but bringing up additional workers to handle load is automated.
There's a risk management piece to certain kinds of automation too. I think everyone who's tried clustering MySQL or PostgreSQL on DRBD using something like Heartbeat or Pacemaker back in the day, with automated failover turned on, has run into the failover scenario where the database and disk flap back and forth between hosts until the entire underlying file structure is completely, unrecoverably corrupt. MongoDB (lol) is theoretically easy to scale out to many nodes by using node discovery in something like Chef, but some drivers (Node) are stupid and will try to connect to database copies that are still initializing, causing timeouts.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Thanks Ants posted:

I understand the pet vs cattle distinction, but presumably you need a system to deploy the cattle and manage the configuration templates centrally as well as keeping track of how healthy your cattle are. Are those systems considered pets or are we now seeing projects emerging that amount to cattle managing cattle?

The cattle analogy extends to breeds.

Your instances aren't important. Your data is. Cloud-init (or other deployment scripts) specifying what a config management master looks like, provisioning with masterless puppet or chef bootstrap or whatever is ideal. These machines should be automatically provisioned.

As for what you're pushing to your clients, the data matters. Very, very large puppet deployments often run masterless and grab manifests from S3 (or other object storage, like Swift) or get it pushed down in cloud-init. Other solutions scale better, so a need for an additional master means deploying one from a template and attaching a new EBS or Cinder volume where the persistent data lives.

Getting these manifests down pat so you can do this takes trial and error, but it means that a new salt master can be added very rapidly, and they can be brought up very quickly after an environment failure.

Database servers should also have data on block storage but be templated from a "this is a database server" manifest.

The point of all this is that saltmaster2 is the same as saltmaster5, and it'll look exactly the same if you destroy it and bring it back, and your business isn't relying on undocumented changes that only one engineer knows about.

Any business can benefit from this, but it's critically important in an environment where Amazon or Rackspace or Microsoft or your private cloud may (and probably has) experienced total environment failure or rolling reboots which terminate your instances in order to fix some security issue.

As for monitoring, autoscaling (Heat, Cloudformations, whatever GCE's thing is called) allow for health checking and alerting in order to grow/shrink the application pool (again from templates).

This clearly isn't suitable for all applications, since responding with "200/OK" doesn't mean something isn't wrong with your message queue or whatever lives behind your applications.

Nagios and Zabbix and other solutions are still popular, though there's some people pushing for more specific application monitoring being run out of Mesos or another batching system like a giant distributed cronjob, or heartbeating in etcd, or...

I don't actually know what best practice for this is. I bet Misogynist or do Docjowles does, though.

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
I've got a meeting tomorrow with a VP from RedHat's cloud arm. It'll be interesting to see how he reacts to our somewhat poor reception of his product. From my boss's attitude, he's been in full damage control mode with us for a month now, so I'll be interested to see how he spins all the problems. We actually have open tickets that are over a year old.

Our last conversation was "The database is starting to really chug, isn't there some maintenance we can be doing?" "Well, I don't think we've ever had a customer that has had such a large database. We're not really sure what we can do uhh I'll have to check with my guys" so we'll see if he's got an update for that.

It's sometimes nice to yell at a vendor, it really makes you feel better, even if it doesn't really solve your problem.

fluppet
Feb 10, 2009
Any one off to the AWS London summit next month?

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug

Misogynist posted:

Through no fault of my own, I've touched almost every major cloud technology in a real production or pre-production capacity in the last 18 months. AWS, Google Compute Engine, SoftLayer, OpenStack, and all the supporting tooling that goes along with it. (No Azure yet.) On the one hand, :suicide:. On the other hand, I've got a pretty solid perspective by now on what the strengths and weaknesses are of all these platforms relative to one another. I'll do a writeup soon.
Hello please do these writeups at some point, we're looking at possibly looking at alternatives but other than AWS and cloudfoundry I don't have a good working knowledge of the other things on offer.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Bhodi posted:

Hello please do these writeups at some point, we're looking at possibly looking at alternatives but other than AWS and cloudfoundry I don't have a good working knowledge of the other things on offer.

Neither cloudfoundry nor AWS are alternatives to cloudforms, if that's the product you're looking at replacing. CSC Agility is, as is vRealize, and Dell's cloud whatever (not sure of the actual name of the product) is getting a good reputation. Are you looking for PaaS, IaaS, orchestration, hybrid management, or some combination of those?

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
Not looking at replacing cloudforms, that's never going away no matter how much I bitch about it :shobon:

But we're looking into expanding offerings into other stuff and my group my be taking on additional work, so we'll have openstack, cloudforms, and possibly a third solution doing unspecific things. I've got some meetings scheduled for later in the month to talk to groups about needs and I was hoping not to go in completely blind.

Also like you mentioned in the VM thread, it's good to know the features and difficulties of all products in a general field.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Bhodi posted:

Not looking at replacing cloudforms, that's never going away no matter how much I bitch about it :shobon:

But we're looking into expanding offerings into other stuff and my group my be taking on additional work, so we'll have openstack, cloudforms, and possibly a third solution doing unspecific things. I've got some meetings scheduled for later in the month to talk to groups about needs and I was hoping not to go in completely blind.

Also like you mentioned in the VM thread, it's good to know the features and difficulties of all products in a general field.

Are those unspecific things IaaS or PaaS?

Part of the problem with the cloud space is that it's not differentiated enough, especially when every new thing becomes FOOBARaaS.

Cloudfoundry is PaaS.

  • Openshift fits into that space, though it's another "evolving" Red Hat product (previous version used a lot of odd SElinux stuff to get something container-like out of it, new version uses Docker and Flannel, not that you'd see the difference as an end user). You can use our instances or run your own on your own infrastructure (this also applies to Cloudfoundry)
  • ElasticBeanstalk is PaaS
  • App Engine
  • Heroku
  • Azure Cloud Services (or Azure Web Sites, I'm not sure how Microsoft has these positioned now

I see "AWS" and think compute/IaaS, whether VPC or EC2 classic/legacy.
Other players are:
  • GCE
  • Azure
  • Rackspace
  • Openstack
  • vCloud, I guess
It would be really difficult to compare the features and difficulties of Heroku and Openstack, as two examples, because they don't play in the same space at all.

But you're already running Openstack, so I'm guessing you're looking at a public IaaS offering? Or you said AWS and meant Elasticbeanstalk? Or...?

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
Don't know yet!

It was a 5 minute blurb from the boss about expansion and possibly merging with another group and hold onto your butts because people are gonna come in with dreams for us and we are gonna smash them.

I'm suspecting it's of the PaaS variety, if I had to guess. I'm part of 2 people flying out to Colorado to represent our team and give a presentation on what we've got now to the big boss in early April, and I assume a road map of some kind will fall out of that.

Knowing my luck, it'll be "Hey, people keep wanting to deploy stuff onto Amazon but we don't want to, what's it going to cost to bring up an internal Amazon?"

With "Amazon" used as the product, exactly like that.

fatman1683
Jan 8, 2004
.

Bhodi posted:

Knowing my luck, it'll be "Hey, people keep wanting to deploy stuff onto Amazon but we don't want to, what's it going to cost to bring up an internal Amazon?"

With "Amazon" used as the product, exactly like that.

Typically when people think 'Cloud' and 'Amazon' in the same thought, what they're actually thinking about is EC2. OpenStack is pretty much the only serious on-premise competitor to EC2 (and much of the rest of Amazon's suite), since as far as I'm aware it's the only one that is being widely operated at scale. You're not going to have a very fun time trying to replace OpenStack or EC2 with vCloud or Azure, which are nowhere near as mature.

However there are lots of 'intermediate' applications where you don't need a fully scalable cloud stack, and platforms like vCloud and Azure are pretty popular with businesses that already have significant investments in VMware or Microsoft, respectively.

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
My group currently supports in-house development for a variety of separate dev stacks; I suspect what they want is some sort of EC2 integration, maybe with VPC because I heard through the grapevine that many devs are secretly opening amazon accounts to get around our arduous firewalls and have been caught trying to tunnel vpn them together with our dev networks multiple times.

Or maybe they want to expand into and offer an actual PaaS offering internally and try and standardize on some sort of stack - we currently don't support anything like that at all.

We don't support a lot of windows, so no azure, thank god. I got OUT of windows deliberately and I still get the random side question because I'm the "windows guy" of our team, especially whenever LDAP integration comes or "What's a GPO" comes up. Or when VMware is being a special snowflake and wants something windows. I'm no expert, though.

Bhodi fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 12, 2015

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.
At my new job the CEO and others have asked about cloud options but they seem more curious than panicked. I thought this would be a good place to talk about what their MSP has been pitching to them as I’m not familiar with much of it.

The corporate HQ is about 50 people and they host their own file server and Exchange from local VMs. There’s a handful of small remote offices, the largest at ten staff. At least two offices have some sort of permanent VPN to HQ via old Sonicwall firewalls. Some are at least ten years old and have to be replaced, but before I do that I need to assess what they're using it for and if it makes sense to keep supporting this old approach.

Over the years due to poor remote access to the HQ file server they’ve improvised, which means that a couple of them wound up building their own local file servers to supplement their storage needs. Some of the users authenticate over the WAN to HQ AD, some have a local domain. HQ and the larger remote office each have stand-alone Shoretel systems. The HQ Shoretel equipment is old and ready for replacement. Some of the staff at HQ are using a Box business account for sharing files with outside people. So it's a fragmented environment with the common elements being that everyone needs access to corporate email and file storage.

At the last place email and file storage was hosted via the MSP at a datacenter. All we had local was a DC and Shoretel gear, but many of the remote sites had Shoretel equipment dependent on what was at HQ. If HQ was disrupted they all suffered along with us.

1. The MSP has proposed moving AD to a service like Amazon and having a DC at each site.
2. Office 365 would take over email and apps.
3. Shoretel Sky could potentially take over phones, allowing HQ and the 10 person site to be on the same system, and as phone equipment leases expire all the other remote sites.
4. File storage is unclear since there’s so many options. I’ve heard both Anchor/eFolder mentioned as well as Pydio. The CEO would like everyone to be able to access files from anywhere, with any device while retaining good security controls over how files are shared (via links.)

I would love to see the HQ server room greatly reduced in importance. Setting aside the persistent earthquake danger all it takes is a sprinkler bursting on the floor above to take it out of action, thereby hosing email for the entire company, and to a lesser degree file storage. Getting email hosted is an easy decision, Office 365 for apps less so. I have two good Shoretel vendors so I’m expecting some honest feedback on Shoretel Sky. AD and file hosting… I really don’t know where to go with these. The interface for file hosting is my number one concern, followed by security and ease of sharing via links because these guys email files like crazy. What I'm trying to do is break all of this into pieces and assess their dependencies. Due to the need to connect to HQ any changes made at my end have a ripple effect.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


Moving Exchange to Office 365 is no-brainer but you could potentially move everything to Office 365. Use OneDrive and or SharePoint instead of a on-prem file server.

I don't really get their recommendation of AD on AWS. Microsoft does have ADaaS and that'd be a better fit.

MagnumOpus
Dec 7, 2006

Is BOSH actually a piece of poo poo or am I missing something? It just seems so archaic compared to Chef or Puppet.

MrMoo
Sep 14, 2000

VMware vCloud Air has to be the most retarded name for a :yayclod: environment.

Google have been competing a lot with Amazon recently by being smarter to save money, from per-minute instances c.f. EC2 per-hour instances to Cloud Pub/Sub to compete with SQS.

I've worked with VMware ESX, VMware Cloud Director and CloudStack, and it is all kinda interesting. Yet to release a single project anywhere on one, they all get stuck in business limbo.

A lot of companies confuse co-lo or managed services with clod computing. Ultimately the software behind a true elastic reliable environment is very difficult and thus beyond many corporate developers so failures are not unexpected.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 17, 2015

Destroyenator
Dec 27, 2004

Don't ask me lady, I live in beer

Dick Trauma posted:

1. The MSP has proposed moving AD to a service like Amazon and having a DC at each site.
2. Office 365 would take over email and apps.
3. Shoretel Sky could potentially take over phones, allowing HQ and the 10 person site to be on the same system, and as phone equipment leases expire all the other remote sites.
4. File storage is unclear since there’s so many options. I’ve heard both Anchor/eFolder mentioned as well as Pydio. The CEO would like everyone to be able to access files from anywhere, with any device while retaining good security controls over how files are shared (via links.)
As Tab8715 said, Azure AD is a thing and works seamlessly with O365. If you do go for the more MS approach you could look at Lync for the phones and keep it all in the same stack/auth/billing/admin system. I don't know enough to recommend it but it might be worth checking out.

orange sky
May 7, 2007

MagnumOpus posted:

Is BOSH actually a piece of poo poo or am I missing something? It just seems so archaic compared to Chef or Puppet.

What's BOSH? I can't find anything on Google.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

orange sky posted:

What's BOSH? I can't find anything on Google.

It's basically unified deployment which combines the principles behind amis/openstack volumes/docker and config management (except it involves a lot of terrible shell scripts) You can find it here.

I've never found a really good use case for it, so I've never used it. It looks like it would excel for standing up scientific computing environments.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Destroyenator posted:

As Tab8715 said, Azure AD is a thing and works seamlessly with O365. If you do go for the more MS approach you could look at Lync for the phones and keep it all in the same stack/auth/billing/admin system. I don't know enough to recommend it but it might be worth checking out.

Azure AD makes alot of sense. I'd like to stick with Shoretel based on my experience at the last place. Good sets, decent administration and reasonably flexible. We have it in place at two sites and the others have low-end small business systems that could be replaced with Shoretel if we went the Sky route. We also use Salesforce which I think is part of Azure's SSO system.

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MagnumOpus
Dec 7, 2006

evol262 posted:

It's basically unified deployment which combines the principles behind amis/openstack volumes/docker and config management (except it involves a lot of terrible shell scripts)

That's the main problem with it. Like Puppet/Chef it lets you describe your networks and services well enough but the deployments are kludgy as gently caress. And when the deployment doesn't work right, triage is a nightmare because the mess of scripts tend to leave artifacts all over the place.

Also you can't use package managers in your nodes because it compiles everything on the master.

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