But, while sales pitches may anthropomorphize "The Cloud" into a sentient and unstoppable being, the reality of "everything as a service" offerings is not quite as tidy as that—yet. And, while a few brave companies with greenfield IT projects may be grabbing onto "almost everything as a service," not everyone is ready to follow them. As many of you told us, all of these new options increase the scope and complexity of a cloud migration. While moving email from local hosting to the cloud may have been obvious (yes, it really is past time to migrate off of Lotus Notes), the vote isn't nearly as automatic with each new level of "as a service" abstraction.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/everything-as-a-service-is-coming-but-were-no
Personally, I was relieved this was mostly about Enterprise infrastructure. Still, things like Stadia https://www.stadia.com/ and Office 365 https://www.office.com/ don't give me a vote of confidence for the future. I don't know about you, but I try to reduce my monthly bills, not increase how many I have.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hartree on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:26PM (4 children)
Stallman has been calling this "Service As a Substitute for Software" or SASS for some time.
I think it refers to "service" in more than one of its meanings.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:40PM (2 children)
"service" := "something you can bill for"
Try to keep your customers dependent on you.
For everything.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:48PM
Once implemented, you can enforce compliance to your business model by threat of discontinuing that service once your customers depend on it.
We already have gotten Congress to pass Copyright and Patent law so the customers can't simply cut us out of the loop once we are in.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @11:35PM
What a nice profitable business you have running there!
"Such a shame if something bad were to happen to it. So frustrating that would be..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:00AM
Yep, they like to service their customers good and hard.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:44PM (1 child)
All these company's survival depends on it IT infrastructure.
So lets setup a single point of failure.
What could possibly go wrong.
And if^H^Hwhen it does, since we outsourced it, we are not responsible.
The first N times a cloud company looses some company's data, the answer might be my bad from the cloud company.
But on loss N+1, it is on the company that chose them.
N should be zero, but with slow learners maybe 1 or 2.
I just hope the laws catch up by 10.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:54PM
BE that single point of failure.
So you can hold entire corporations hostage for your permission to run.
Your main challenge is finding corporate executives who will accept your free business lunch, shake your hand, and sign your papers.
Once you are "in", you got 'em by the balls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:47PM (1 child)
>> things like Stadia https://www.stadia.com/ [stadia.com] and Office 365 https://www.office.com/ [office.com]
I'm looking at you, Adobe... (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:43AM
And Autodesk. They can pry my perpetual license for autocad 2012 from my cold dead hands.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)
Dependency management is the toughest part about service-centric designs. Let's say you build software that has 20 components that come from 10 different vendors. The chance that ANY one of them changes enough to break your app or is discontinued is fairly high. If Vendor X wants to change or remove Service Y, then can and you can't do diddly squat about it. It's gone.
With the so called "monolithic" approach, you make a snapshot of the components at a slice of time and they pretty much stay the way they are; until the point YOU choose to change them.
Nobody moves your EXE cheese without asking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @11:15PM
For execs who subscribe to the deals, it is no-lose proposition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @10:56PM (2 children)
Where is NRA on this?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 04 2019, @11:04PM
Cloudy, with a chance of hail.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @01:15AM
They are in favor of weaponizing software and/or business models as long as no one has to fill out a form to use them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:38AM (6 children)
Sigh. Everyone has forgotten how hobbyists in the early 1970s scrounged for parts so they could have a few bits of computing power that were actually UNDER THEIR OWN CONTROL. All for that far-off science fiction-ish dream of "personal computing".
Idiots have all flushed it down the toilet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:45AM (2 children)
You can get a "supercomputer" for $5-10, and control the heck out of it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:58AM (1 child)
Even with all the undocumented binary blobs?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 05 2019, @01:16AM
Pay no attention to the blobs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday September 05 2019, @01:07AM (1 child)
That's the reason I am so hung on Arduino.
I know it's gonna do what I code it to do, without it also being someone else's wishlist compliance monitor, infraction reporter, and enforcement agent by means of digital insubordination to me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @03:19AM
Or conveniently used as an access point to get into the corporate network.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:00AM
Sounds like you were there.
Like almost everything else in the field of human endeavor, it got “monetized”.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:13AM
We're already there:
How to steal an American city: Montes v. City of Yakima - https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/montes-v-city-yakima-0 [aclu-wa.org]
Embezzlement & swindling at the state level: McCleary, et al. v. State of Washington - Supreme Court Case Number 84362-7: https://www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supremecourt/?fa=supremecourt.mccleary_education [wa.gov]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:33AM (4 children)
Anybody who hands the keys of their kingdom to a cloud service is a fucking moron who deserves to go out of business.
No fucking thank you. Put in the time, and the dime, to do your own thing and own your own future. Everything else is leaving yourself to the tender mercies of the next cadre of MBAs hot to pump the cloud company share price and dump their shares (and fuck the customers and what they want).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:58AM
If FDIC insured bank runs it's infrastructure on AWS, does it mean that Federal Reserve would have to bail out Amazon?
I think the answer is yes.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by evilcam on Thursday September 05 2019, @03:01AM (2 children)
I disagree.
As a business (especially a public company) you have a responsibility to your customers to deliver the best possible service at the lowest possible price point in order to maintain a competitive environment. If someone can perform back-of-house tasks for you better than you can for less than you can, why would you not engage that service? IT is no different in this regard; the whole point of IT outsourcing is the removal of specific costs and risks. That doesn't make you a "fucking moron who deserves to go out of business" that makes you a businessman that is adapting to the changing marketplace.
This isn't radically new and businesses have been literally doing it for half a century... Peter Drucker [wikipedia.org] had this all down in the 60's, talking about taking the thing you business is focused around delivering, and delivering only that, whilst leaving the things you're not focused (and don't have the specific expertise to do) to someone else.
E.g. payroll or legal or marketing.
So yeah, I will make the call to move email for my business to GSuite or O365 because I cannot do it better and cheaper myself. I will outsource my CRM to salesforce or Oracle or Microsoft if they can do it better (i.e. utility and warranty) than I can.
Focus on what you do and do it well.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday September 05 2019, @03:48AM (1 child)
No problems there, as long as they are fungible. I don't make my PCB either. I get someone else to do that far better than I could. Far cheaper too!
But I'd be dammed to let done yayhoo nook me into a CAD system I can't outright buy, just as I would not think they would go for a payment that evaporates in a year. They are not dependent on me, but once I work with proprietary software, it is all too easy to hold all my work hostage as incentive to compel me to accept whatever terms and conditions placed before me.
So I continue using my old EAGLE, Futurenet, and PADS PCB. One runs under WIN7 / Linux, the other runs under DOS. Yes, I still can support things I did 40 years ago.
Industrial machinery can easily last 100 years. I've seen too much perfectly good machinery tossed for technical obsolence, despite it still could do what it was designed to do, as well as it ever did. Besides that, all the people working with that machine all have parts of themselves ( their ideas, improvements, not body parts ) in it. It's a pride of workmanship thing that's hard to assign a monetary value to.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 05 2019, @05:24AM
And that's exactly the problem: If you can't put a monetary value to it, MBAs won't accept it as valuable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @06:05AM (1 child)
A single takedown of the whole cloud for some time will cure the stupidity for sure. And capitalism does not guarantee the service provider will operate forever, this will happen. Just wait.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 05 2019, @10:33AM
Can't wait.
The whole concept of SaaS should have been killed with fire at birth.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by darkfeline on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:38AM (4 children)
> I don't know about you, but I try to reduce my monthly bills, not increase how many I have.
The nature of reality is constant upkeep. Take your body for example, you've got you pay your daily bills for water and food, and your minutely bill for oxygen, as well as your waste disposal bills for carbon dioxide, heat, excrement. You have to repair and maintain your house/car. You have to pay for electricity, water, public roads, etc etc.
I mean, theoretically we could advance to a point where all you have to do is pay (have extracted automatically) a single living expenses bill to a central AI system that manages all of society and every individual's life, but I suspect you'll have objections to such a world (Soylentils doth protest too much).
If you dislike centralization, then you'll want your monthly bills as fragmented as possible, and if you dislike continuous maintenance costs, your best bet is shuffling off the mortal coil.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Touché) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 05 2019, @10:43AM (2 children)
Every time I hear someone spout this line of thinking, I think of Joe Chip trapped in his apartment [wikipedia.org] because he doesn't have a dime for the door.
And as far as...
...please, by all means...after you. I insist.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
Uh, you were the one who complained about regular maintenance costs, not me. I'm perfectly content paying bills for my continued existence. I have no idea how you were modded touche.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday September 06 2019, @04:31AM
I saw a reply from Freeman, but didn't notice that the GP reply was not the reply from Freeman. Mea culpa, substitute "you" with "Freeman" in the above post.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday September 05 2019, @02:35PM
There are certain things, that you need to pay a monthly bill for. Clean Water, Electricity, Waste Disposal, etc. For some definition of need as in some areas it's pretty easy to get good water from a Well, reliable power via Solar or Wind, and Septic Systems for waste. Requiring a monthly bill for everything, means you have less wiggle room, if your budget is tight.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"