You would have a Windows machine on Amazon EC2 that runs the backup applications. Then instead of spinning up virtual machines running your app, you spin up other EC2 machines based on an AMI you have created. You would use the EBS snapshot feature instead of the VBox snapshot feature.
I concede that this would legitimately work, however, I still don't see how much easier it would be than having a non-VBox VM infrastructure. The main problem here is that VBox isn't very good, but using a good alternative VM product would fix this. At my last job, we used VMWare ESX and it worked smooth as silk.
Plus, if AWS is so great, how come you (and/or your company) are using VirtualBox instead of AWS?
The fact is, despite what Amazon, Google, et al want you to believe, not everything is going to be completely in the cloud. For various legitimate reasons, organizations are going to want to keep some of their data and applications local based on size, budget, regulatory concerns, security, control (Amazon can deactivate your AWS account at will, like what happened to Wikileaks), and who knows how many other reasons out there. The future of IT is most likely going to be a hybrid model, where some things are indeed in the cloud, but other things are kept close to home on a case-by-case basis.
The reason I use Virtualbox is because my computer is a Windows computer, but I want to develop on Linux. My laptop has a powerful CPU, why pay for an Amazon machine and have the resources on my desk go unused? You can bet that if VirtualBox didn't work, and I couldn't get a local Linux machine, I would setup a machine on Amazon for development. I have done so in the past, and I probably will again.
As for all those concerns, Amazon does pretty much everything they can to alleviate all of them. They have done such a good job of it that even the government trusts AWS for lots of things. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/ They have just about every security certification in the universe. Amazon is almost always much more inexpensive than running your own machines due to economy of scale. And if you are a legitimate business, you aren't going to be shut down.
The real #1 concern with Amazon is vendor lock-in. You can use a lot of their services without being locked in, and we do. For example, RDS is just MySQL. EC2 is just Linux. But let's say you start using DynamoDB. Now if you want to leave Amazon you need to rebuild your app to use a different database because you can't run your own Dynamo DB. If you use SQS, and you bail you'll have to rewrite to use something like rabbitmq or another AMQP service.
The only thing we are locked in on is S3, but it is not hard to change the storage backend in our application architecture.
I don't think the economy of scale works out quite as well as you think, though it depends on just what you're doing. If you want to build out a huge data center, then yeah, unless you're a pretty darned big company yourself that's pushing the size of Amazon, odds are it's cheaper to ride on their infrastructure. If you are big enough, well, then cut out the middleman and build it yourself and you may end up being cheaper than paying Amazon to do so.
Part of their issue is that their pricing is based purely on usage, meaning it can be hard to exactly figure out what the budget would be. For example, if you need their 10Gbps link for 24 hours a day, that comes to almost $20k a year (and that's just for the connection -- let alone data transfer, CPU time, and so on). For that same price, I can easily get several high end boxes to run my own virtual infrastructure on and let it depreciate over several years until those boxes are obsolete (suitable for development testing at least -- I know that server-grade hardware would be much more expensive). Yes, I know, you may not necessarily be banging on those links 24/7, but even if it's something like 8/7, that still comes to over $6k a year, which can still purchase multiple reasonably high-end boxes that can be depreciated over multiple years.
In other words, use the right tool for the right job. If AWS is the right tool for the job, then go ahead and use it. However, if it's not the right tool, then don't use it.
In other words, use the right tool for the right job. If AWS is the right tool for the job, then go ahead and use it. However, if it's not the right tool, then don't use it.
Of course, always the right tool for the right job. But just to show you, your estimation of whether or not it is the right tool may not be 100% on target.
For example, you buy your own boxes. Now you need to spend time setting them up. You need to deal if those boxes fail. You need to hire IT people to manage the boxes and the network. You get a lot more for your money when you get hosting rather than do it yourself. For any workload of significant size, it is very rarely less expensive to do it yourself when you factor in all the things you get. With one click you can multi-zone your database so that it is continuously backed up on multiple tectonic plates, multiple continents, different power grids, different network links, etc. That's the kind of thing you just can't buy, if you need it.
Also, paying only for usage does make the billing unpredictable if you do not have a steady usage pattern. Who knows if you will need a lot more usage this month compared to last month? But on the other hand, it means you can save money. Turn your servers off at night, pay nothing. There are lots of strategies you can use to bring the cost down a great deal. You can even bid for spot instances and crazy stuff like that.
And then on the minus side. If you want to save as much money as possible, you need to spend a lot of time building systems that save money. You have to build a system that will turn machines on and off as needed. You have to implement all kinds of firewalls and things to minimize using bandwidth on bullshit. You have to closely manage your storage so that you delete or expire anything that isn't needed anymore. It can be an entire job just to implement money saving procedures. It works out mathematically in the long run in most cases.
I think you just sort of proved my point, though I was vague about my point. Determining whether or not AWS is the right tool for your job isn't always easy. You have to compare the cost of AWS vs. the cost of implementing your own solution. AWS offers a lot of great stuff you may not get easily any other way, but it may cost more than your own homebrew solution if your requirements are modest enough or if they are large enough. Even with AWS, you'll still need an IT staff (even if it only consists of a single Unix Santa) to manage the local network and workstations that connect to AWS. It may not be that much more expensive to add other functionality to your local IT setup if you don't need too much more on top of the basics required to access AWS. If I just need a basic departmental wiki server, for example, I wouldn't use AWS to set it up -- I'd just set up a single box under my desk and plug it in to the network (or maybe even run it on a VM on an existing box that's under-utilized). In that case, using AWS adds needless cost and complexity to the problem. Now if I needed to reproduce Wikipedia and expose it to the entire internet to bang on, then AWS becomes a much more compelling proposition.
FWIW, the product I work on is one of those products designed to help IT departments save money -- it's an appliance that performs deduplication on backups so that you can cram 300 or so backup jobs in the same disk space as a single backup job (the exact dedupe ratio, of course, depends on the nature of the backup jobs, so don't hold me to that number -- the number may be higher or lower in real life).
Part of my AWS (and it's not just Amazon, but all the other cloud providers -- feel free to equate AWS with any cloud provider out there for this discussion) skepticism is that I have seen this all before. At one time, it was called utility computing. Then it became grid computing. Now it's called cloud computing. Pundits for years have been saying that one day everything in IT would be delivered "as a utility," or via "the grid," and now via "the cloud." It never panned out. Cloud computing has gotten further along than the other similar techs, but I still don't see it changing everything to the extent that many tech pundits have predicted. As I said earlier, the future is in a hybrid model where, depending on each customer's requirements, some stuff will remain local and some will go to the cloud. Some customers, if they are big enough, may even want to implement an internal "private cloud" for their own purposes.
I hate how so much of the gun/knife/multitool community is vehemently conservative. Just because I'm into gadgets and knives and shit doesn't mean I hate gay people and think Obama is a Socialist Nazi.
I hate how so much of the gun/knife/multitool community is vehemently conservative. Just because I'm into gadgets and knives and shit doesn't mean I hate gay people and think Obama is a Socialist Nazi.
It's not just that community... Apparently the pilot community also leans that way for some crazy reason. It was enough that an aviation blogger I follow stopped his blog because he got tired of all the right-wing wacko comments on it.
So, I went in to buy some Pipe tobacco today, and ended up chatting to the woman at the smoke shop, hand a decent chat, but she was having a bad day, and she had been feeling pretty rough, mentioned she was a bit depressed.
So, I wandered around for a few hours, cowboy'ed up, and just before I left the shopping center, I walked into the smoke shop, said hi again, and said to her that she's intelligent, pretty, interesting, and fun to talk to. That her friends love her, everything is going to be okay, and I really hoped to see her again next time I was by.
She kinda blushed, smiled a breathtakingly nice smile, said thank you and she hoped so, and I fucking legged it as fast as I could inconspicuously leg it, because as calm and happy as I seemed at the time, I was fucking bricking it on the inside. Good with women, I am not. Didn't help that she was gorgeous. Like, Margret Nolan in her heyday gorgeous.
I'm pretty drunk, just putting that out there. Since his is a thread for random comments, that's all I have to say. Also, I've had a lot to drink tonight. Whoo!
Margret Nolan gorgeous? Damn. Well, points for cheering her up. Well done.
Yep. Not just in style, she had a similar sort of face and bearing.
For those who the name doesn't ring a bell, To save you watching a few carry on films, or Goldfinger, the SFW version : (Hotlinked because imgur has decided to cack itself and I can't be bothered waiting for it to sort itself out)
She also starred in Hard Day's Night (Which is ace, watch it) and the amusingly titled "No sex please, We're British."
Space Marine Scouts with a 2+ cover save is credit to team. They didn't take a casualty till turn 6. If they'd have survived that assault, they'd have earned their power armor.
Random skype conversation: Sonic's little bro, after Victoria briefly puts him on to say hi to Omnom and I: V: "Churba, what's your favorite thing?" O: "Rum." C: "That's pretty accurate."
I'm stuck somewhere between gracefully accepting the compliment, and suggesting that neither of you should have children.
Role model for adults? sure. You're an awesome dude. Role model for children? Fuck. No. Not without some HEAVY image control.
Glad we agree. There is far too much that simply isn't for children. Sure, an acceptable enough "uncle", as it were, and not the worst with children, but there is a difference between Uncle Churba teaching the young one how to throw a punch, and the young one seeing Uncle Churba in a fight, or hearing the blow-by-blow, just as an example.
I'll dander 'em on my knee till either the daylight or my knees give out. Teach 'em to pitch a good fastball, build a cabinet, build them a treehouse, teach them how to be safe around firearms. But don't expect me to teach them how to be good people, I haven't even managed to really teach myself that yet, I just play at being one from time to time.
Currently arguing with Daryl Surat via Twitter on the merits of case studies of autistic people who can express romantic love and get married. Entertaining!
So, the internship I applied for last week that I want pretty much more than anything else in the world right now, haven't heard anything back yet and I planned on sending a follow up email tomorrow. I've had their website's internship page pinned inside Firefox, checking it every day just in case something changed, and today the internship description disappeared and was replaced with "Coming Soon." I don't know if this is a good sign or a bad sign.
Comments
Plus, if AWS is so great, how come you (and/or your company) are using VirtualBox instead of AWS?
The fact is, despite what Amazon, Google, et al want you to believe, not everything is going to be completely in the cloud. For various legitimate reasons, organizations are going to want to keep some of their data and applications local based on size, budget, regulatory concerns, security, control (Amazon can deactivate your AWS account at will, like what happened to Wikileaks), and who knows how many other reasons out there. The future of IT is most likely going to be a hybrid model, where some things are indeed in the cloud, but other things are kept close to home on a case-by-case basis.
The reason I use Virtualbox is because my computer is a Windows computer, but I want to develop on Linux. My laptop has a powerful CPU, why pay for an Amazon machine and have the resources on my desk go unused? You can bet that if VirtualBox didn't work, and I couldn't get a local Linux machine, I would setup a machine on Amazon for development. I have done so in the past, and I probably will again.
As for all those concerns, Amazon does pretty much everything they can to alleviate all of them. They have done such a good job of it that even the government trusts AWS for lots of things. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/ They have just about every security certification in the universe. Amazon is almost always much more inexpensive than running your own machines due to economy of scale. And if you are a legitimate business, you aren't going to be shut down.
The real #1 concern with Amazon is vendor lock-in. You can use a lot of their services without being locked in, and we do. For example, RDS is just MySQL. EC2 is just Linux. But let's say you start using DynamoDB. Now if you want to leave Amazon you need to rebuild your app to use a different database because you can't run your own Dynamo DB. If you use SQS, and you bail you'll have to rewrite to use something like rabbitmq or another AMQP service.
The only thing we are locked in on is S3, but it is not hard to change the storage backend in our application architecture.
Part of their issue is that their pricing is based purely on usage, meaning it can be hard to exactly figure out what the budget would be. For example, if you need their 10Gbps link for 24 hours a day, that comes to almost $20k a year (and that's just for the connection -- let alone data transfer, CPU time, and so on). For that same price, I can easily get several high end boxes to run my own virtual infrastructure on and let it depreciate over several years until those boxes are obsolete (suitable for development testing at least -- I know that server-grade hardware would be much more expensive). Yes, I know, you may not necessarily be banging on those links 24/7, but even if it's something like 8/7, that still comes to over $6k a year, which can still purchase multiple reasonably high-end boxes that can be depreciated over multiple years.
In other words, use the right tool for the right job.
For example, you buy your own boxes. Now you need to spend time setting them up. You need to deal if those boxes fail. You need to hire IT people to manage the boxes and the network. You get a lot more for your money when you get hosting rather than do it yourself. For any workload of significant size, it is very rarely less expensive to do it yourself when you factor in all the things you get. With one click you can multi-zone your database so that it is continuously backed up on multiple tectonic plates, multiple continents, different power grids, different network links, etc. That's the kind of thing you just can't buy, if you need it.
Also, paying only for usage does make the billing unpredictable if you do not have a steady usage pattern. Who knows if you will need a lot more usage this month compared to last month? But on the other hand, it means you can save money. Turn your servers off at night, pay nothing. There are lots of strategies you can use to bring the cost down a great deal. You can even bid for spot instances and crazy stuff like that.
And then on the minus side. If you want to save as much money as possible, you need to spend a lot of time building systems that save money. You have to build a system that will turn machines on and off as needed. You have to implement all kinds of firewalls and things to minimize using bandwidth on bullshit. You have to closely manage your storage so that you delete or expire anything that isn't needed anymore. It can be an entire job just to implement money saving procedures. It works out mathematically in the long run in most cases.
FWIW, the product I work on is one of those products designed to help IT departments save money -- it's an appliance that performs deduplication on backups so that you can cram 300 or so backup jobs in the same disk space as a single backup job (the exact dedupe ratio, of course, depends on the nature of the backup jobs, so don't hold me to that number -- the number may be higher or lower in real life).
Part of my AWS (and it's not just Amazon, but all the other cloud providers -- feel free to equate AWS with any cloud provider out there for this discussion) skepticism is that I have seen this all before. At one time, it was called utility computing. Then it became grid computing. Now it's called cloud computing. Pundits for years have been saying that one day everything in IT would be delivered "as a utility," or via "the grid," and now via "the cloud." It never panned out. Cloud computing has gotten further along than the other similar techs, but I still don't see it changing everything to the extent that many tech pundits have predicted. As I said earlier, the future is in a hybrid model where, depending on each customer's requirements, some stuff will remain local and some will go to the cloud. Some customers, if they are big enough, may even want to implement an internal "private cloud" for their own purposes.
So, I wandered around for a few hours, cowboy'ed up, and just before I left the shopping center, I walked into the smoke shop, said hi again, and said to her that she's intelligent, pretty, interesting, and fun to talk to. That her friends love her, everything is going to be okay, and I really hoped to see her again next time I was by.
She kinda blushed, smiled a breathtakingly nice smile, said thank you and she hoped so, and I fucking legged it as fast as I could inconspicuously leg it, because as calm and happy as I seemed at the time, I was fucking bricking it on the inside. Good with women, I am not. Didn't help that she was gorgeous. Like, Margret Nolan in her heyday gorgeous.
For those who the name doesn't ring a bell, To save you watching a few carry on films, or Goldfinger, the SFW version :
(Hotlinked because imgur has decided to cack itself and I can't be bothered waiting for it to sort itself out)
She also starred in Hard Day's Night (Which is ace, watch it) and the amusingly titled "No sex please, We're British."
And the Less SFW version, but still only Mildly NSFW.
What'd you expect? She was one of the most famous pinups of her day.
Sonic's little bro, after Victoria briefly puts him on to say hi to Omnom and I:
V: "Churba, what's your favorite thing?"
O: "Rum."
C: "That's pretty accurate."
I'll dander 'em on my knee till either the daylight or my knees give out. Teach 'em to pitch a good fastball, build a cabinet, build them a treehouse, teach them how to be safe around firearms. But don't expect me to teach them how to be good people, I haven't even managed to really teach myself that yet, I just play at being one from time to time.
Second thing I'm teaching them is the ramifications for doing so unprovoked.