Another One Bites the Dust: Cisco Discontinues Its $1B Cloud Initiative as AWS, Azure and Others Expand (geekwire.com) 34
Cisco will abandon its InterCloud cloud-computing offering on March 31 and will move any InterCloud workloads to other, unnamed cloud providers, including "in some cases, public cloud." From a report on GeekWire: Cisco's pull-back from the cloud scene marks the latest example of smaller participants -- many of them hardware-makers -- bailing in the face of huge growth by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and to some extent by Google Cloud, IBM and other, smaller public-cloud services. Hewlett-Packard in 2015 abandoned its efforts to be a public-cloud company. Then, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises essentially shut down its much-ballyhooed Helion cloud offering earlier this year. VMware still offers its vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service, though it has agreed to partner with AWS, which it once viewed as its arch-rival for cloud workloads. "We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition," Cisco said in response to a request for comment. "For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this."
The bubble is popping (Score:3)
It seems companies are finally realizing they've been over-saturating the market with cheap VPS and people are finally starting to realize the security and other implications of shared hosting at a handful of providers.
I don't know if Dyn's outage a few weeks ago finally got the managers to listen and start diversifying their systems again.
Re: The bubble is popping (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, whippersnapper (different 'grandpa' here). I'm not sure if 'amazing' to you means 'has useful functionality' or 'does things I'm too clueless to figure out', but let's go with the first one just for argument's sake.
The things that make AWS amazing are management tools and applications. It's nothing that can't and won't filter down to ownable equipment, if not by them than by a competitor.
See, there's this thing called economics. What you've got right now is Amazon and Microsoft basically becoming a cloud duopoly. When they finish, they'll become a rent seeking duopoly and start raising prices. A lot. Microsoft already does this when you renew Office365 subscriptions. People aren't going to like or put up with this permanently and, unlike with cable and ISPs, there's nothing stopping them from making choices.
Cloud is already not cheaper at any kind of permanent scale, and by that I mean I always need X resources all the time. Sure it helps in those very few and highly marketed edge cases where you have 10 servers and need 100 for a week or so, but most people's businesses don't work like that. It's also good for very small businesses that have nothing, at least as a starter set.
So on prem stuff will become more attractive again as it becomes more capable and easier to manage, or actual cloud competition will develop, or likely both. What will NOT happen is everybody uses Amazon and Azure for everything like the cloud snake oil peddlers keep predicting. We'll settle into a world where people use what's logical for them to use.
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The other thing that will kill cloud is arbitrary service alterations when the duopoly gets cocky, and the fact that smaller providers can just pack up and leave.
Basically if you use too many privately owned, nonstandard APIs/infrastructure, you are in for hurt when those stop being offered on a whim. It will probably take a few decades before this lesson filters up to PHBs, but someday there will come a buzzword down the tubes that means "stop using any old thing a company offers and stick to standards."
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I work for one of the major cloud providers listed above. In addition to market saturation, what is also killing them off is the massive capital investment required. The place I used to work for thought hey we will just buy a bunch of Cisco UCS chassis and make a "cloud" environment out of it. It sucked. To get into the major leagues, you have to basically build your own custom hardware... specialized stuff, high performance, low latency, very energy efficient. The cost of the servers is enormous, plus the
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i'm sure building the software around it is also a big deal
MS launched it's first cloud service around 2002 or 2003. i was one of the original users when xbox live first launched. they were also learning from hotmail at the time and they had a bunch of other projects at the time that weren't public. i even tested a MS version of dropbox, before there was a dropbox. MS killed it and from what i heard these guys then started dropbox
AWS launched something like a decade ago after Amazon built A9 and some other
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You can if you believe the BS from Rackspace and Facebook... OpenStack! (hint: you'll die of old age or commit suicide long before you get anything remotely usable based on openstack) You can quickly setup a "cloud" using VMware's collection of purchases, but you'll go insane trying to make sense of it all, and end up bankrupt.
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Okay, they are expensive VPS with an API to generate more VPS from a barebones image. Once you get down to the metal, there is actually nothing new or complex to the whole cloud thing, yes, the programs are more complex to bootstrap a virtual datacenter instead of a single virtual server but there is no 'special sauce' going on that turns it into a self-aware entity that knows how to obtain more resources.
We had a similar setup way back when I first entered the industry at a dotcom hosting company, I was on
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"We had a similar setup way back when I first entered the industry at a dotcom hosting company"
What was the company's name?
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MS - made it easy by integrating with their products
AWS - been there from the early days and the same, a lot of tools have ties to AWS built into their product
IBM - Th
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on non-sensitive information
What's that? Never heard of it.
Much Ballyhooed? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Damend if you do, damned if you don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Less about capability, more about lack of standards. IPMI works very well because it was an exceptionally specific standard, that encompassed the requisite functionality without wiggle room.. Just like SNMP mibs developed in the late 90s were nice and specific (and even then, Cisco ignored many of those in favor their proprietary mibs).
In this century, the vendors have taken back control of the newer so-called management 'standards' and make them all terrible. Netconf, CIM, Redfish, all terrible. They al
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The desired goal is vendor lock-in. HP(e)'s OneView makes UCM look downright sane.
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Real Datacenters uses http://opendcim.org/ or something like it. (shill warning: I know the developers) that is OSS, headed up by 2 former Vanderbilt University Datacenter ops employees who have made this tool to not only help themselves but others. It is even used at CERN to keep track of the servers collecting all the HLC data.
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value-added fart huffing contest
I am sooooo stealing that.
Heavy clouds (Score:2, Insightful)
This is precisely why I don't rely on the cloud exclusively. It could be any company on any day, and your data is just history. Poof! We simply can't rely on third parties for everything, it isn't realistic and it isn't smart. We need to be the arbiters of our own lives and affairs, not Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, Evernote, etc., ad infinitum.
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This is precisely why I don't rely on the cloud exclusively. It could be any company on any day, and your data is just history. Poof!
And that's why backups exists (specially incremental backups). Cloud providers (large, reputable ones, that is) do not disappear within 24 hours. They give you plenty of time to offload to another provider or to physical storage.
And with providers like AWS, redundancy pretty much nullifies most forms of data loss. Any data loss that you experience will most likely be a function of your application or your data management policies.
"vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well there's your problem VMware, you really need a catchier name than that! Not sure who come up with the current but it is terrible.
Also "For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this.", I'm not sure it's "evolving" if your plan is to discontinue it. Extincting might be a better word (if that even is one).
Re:"vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service" (Score:4, Funny)
I guess the positive side of VMWare is that whey they pick a name, they usually only stick with it for about 6 months or so.
I wonder why (Score:2)
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You're absolutely right in that Cisco is not a company with any concept of how to compete on price. I'll do one better though - there's no integration with anything, and thus no reason to use Cisco over AWS/Azure/GCC. Those companies have massive scale, and playing catch-up isn't cheap without a reason to not just use one of them. VMWare can do hybrid cloud better than Google can, so they can successfully charge a bit more to companies who need certain things on-prem while cloudifying others as they decommi