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Originally Posted by McG
I don’t work for AWS or Microsoft but I know a tiny bit about this and cloud in general.
At the most basic cloud, you are doing whatever you would do on premise in your own raised floor on someone else’s raised floor and hardware. With the right preparation, you can move your VMs up and down to the cloud as an extension of on premise to create a hybrid cloud.
At the most extreme, some of the things that you can do start to look like magic. Infrastructure as code, auto scaling, auto patching, lambdas that detect code changes and auto replicate, massive computational power, and many, many little tricks to optimize environments. Infinitely scalable up and down too.
On jobs, there are thousands of vacancies and between cloud architects and cloud security, these jobs are highly in demand and will only increase in demand.
Financially, cloud can eliminate capital costs and replace them with operating costs which is usually beneficial to accountants. Imagine never buying hardware again and only paying for what you use instead of trying to guess your environment.
The thing that blew me away was setting up an environment; dmz, app, operating system, database, size and configuration of the environment. A few mouse clicks and there it was, “recommended configuration A”. Wrong one? Delete the environment, choose “recommended configuration b”, and away you go. Minutes of work. This would literally take months to RFP, design, implement, and then find out it was wrong? Return hardware, redo everything…. It’s hard to imagine.
True cloud computing is well beyond using someone else’s hardware though, and yet for many, that’s all they need.
I’ve definitely drank the koolaid on cloud.
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Best summary presented. Cloud provisioning is being called the fourth industrial revolution for good reason, it will transform the way business is done. Technologies and services that would have been too expensive for small organizations to access are now within reach. Complex applications that could not run on certain platforms now have ubiquitous access. Limitations on business because of infrastructure requirements or scalability challenges are disappearing. IT shops can now do way more with a lot less, both from personnel and fiscal perspectives. The most important thing, at least from my perspective, is the security advantage. These solutions have security baked in from the start and exceed the most rigorous security requirements, far surpassing what can be done in house by all but the biggest enterprises.
IT is a young man's game and the cloud is really for those who have a very malleable level of brain plasticity. Virtual networking is hard enough to explain to people, using analogies of Christopher Nolan's
Inception to explain the complexity and how virtual infrastructure can exist on a single host, but cloud is a whole new ball game. Kubernetes and containerization is like taking
Inception and then showing it on a screen with each cell of film being projected from a projector, from a different theatre, from a different city, and then being able to show each individual ticket holder the movie from the start whenever they chose to enter the theatre of their choice. There are no show times ad you get to see whatever cut of the movie you desire. It is a new way of service provision and the technology that makes it all work does appear to be magic. If you can master this stuff, the world is your oyster because there are few people out there that can design and build these systems. Opportunity knocks folks. Crack the books and get at it right now.