What was a fear, becomes a strength
Humans originally evolved to be dependent on fear. In modern life, the fears that we had evolved around are no longer relevant; we are not going to be hunted by large animals, we have conquered the dark, winter and times of hunger are distant memories. It may be true to state that what was a fear, becomes a strength – large animals have been driven out or domesticated to become our food, the use of artificial light has allowed us to use the whole day, and we produce so much food that we throw much of it away.
What was a fear, becomes a strength
Within technology, what we were frightened about draws our focus, and then it becomes the strongest part of it. We focus on the fear, and efforts are put into resolving it. We do this inherently, sometimes with an undue focus that makes the rest of the technology a secondary concern.
Air travel was originally very dangerous – and the fear of flying meant that the focus of aircraft producers and operators has been on safety, and now flying in a plane is more safe than many other activities. There is no safer way to travel large distances – but people still fear it, because when there is a disaster, it is much bigger and affects more people.
Food sources have been a concern of humans for all evolution. When humans developed agriculture and domesticated animals, we learnt to select the most productive crop or offspring. This has now meant that we have high calorie, high density foods, enhanced for our tastes for sweet or rich foods. So now, not only do we have an obesity epidemic, we have also evolved to have stomachs that cannot process many raw foods, and are sensitive to microbes that do not affect most other animals.
Components in servers became hot pluggable, to allow for parts to be replaced when they fail, without the server being taken off-line. However, components have now been manufactured to higher quality and capabilities, and redundant components can take more of the load. Monitoring software can predict failures with components, and software is deployed to ensure maximum uptime. With the move to virtualisation, there is less of a problem to take a server off-line, as workloads can move with no impact. The drive to redundant arrays of independent devices (RADIO) makes the hot pluggable components less vital.
Virtualisation has also had an impact on RAM size in servers. When virtualisation was new, the bottleneck was RAM – 32 bit CPUs had access to only 4GB, and so the hardware was designed to only take 4GB – there was no need to design a server that could hold more. Once virtualisation became mainstream, it became very difficult to purchase a modern server that had as little as 4GB. Even though as much as 90% of virtual machines have less than 4GB, you can’t really buy a physical server that small!
Computing and CPU core counts have a similar story to RAM. Most workloads work just fine on a couple of CPUs, and when you add more CPUs, it can actually make the server slower. Most software is not optimised for multiple CPUs, yet you can’t buy a single-core / single CPU server any more. The decision of CPU model is not as important as it was – they are all fast. The bottleneck of limited numbers of CPUs for sizing your virtual hosts has gone away – and now the bottleneck has moved away to other components, and even the software.
Cloud security
So now the fear is around Cloud Security. You run your services in someone else’s datacentre, and because you can’t physically touch it, there is a fear that it is not secure. Public incidents of data leakage and hacking – or of cloud provider administration errors that cause downtime – are in the forefront of your consciousness when it comes to considering Cloud.
Similar to plane travel, incidents are large and very public, significant and worrying – but the providers and operators make it their prime focus. The efforts put into security for cloud services are extensive, so much that it even gets more focus than other capabilities and developments. However, similar to air travel, the association with risk hangs around – people remember the past failures for a long time.
However, compare the security efforts to your own capabilities. Cloud operators have dedicated security teams who work 24×7 to monitor and manage security threats, trying to keep a few steps ahead of the hackers. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are able to pay for the most advanced skills in security, able to invest millions in pre-emptive protection and mitigation, and even the smaller providers are able to hire the best local people for security. Datacentres for cloud operators are often in undisclosed locations, are exceptionally strict with physical access, and require full background checks of all employees that have any level of access to the physical or virtualisation layer. Would your own datacentre have the same levels of protection?
Security is a hot topic for cloud providers. They also focus on meeting the stringent security requirements for government and military customers, so do you really think that your needs are not being met?
