Image of a limit courtesy One Sage Math Calculus Tutorial
While Amazon Redshift offers “fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service… for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1,000 per terabyte per year” (and I can do it for less – see below) there are limits to the cloud.
The Cloud is great for start-ups like Itemize and for small and mid-size companies that can’t afford data centers and dedicated full-time system administrators. For an overview, see “Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing,” by Eric Marks and Bob Lozano, ISBN 978-0-470-52172-4.
However, governments and large companies have their own private clouds and will continue to do so. Apple, for example, did not implement the Apple (Internet) Store on Amazon.com. Apple is not using Amazon Web Services as the underlying infrastructure for the App Store, iTunes, etc. Illustrating that “The Cloud” can only provide information services, while Apple has an online store available in 39 countries, it also has 424 retail stores in 16 countries (wikipedia – Apple Store).
Google is not using Microsoft’s Office 365, Hotmail, or Outlook.com as it’s underlying platform for GMail. Nor is Microsoft implementing Azure or Office 365 on IBM‘s Blue Mix Cloud Services, HP’s Helion Cloud Services, or Amazon’s Web Services, AWS.
The CIA might consider hosting the CIA Fact Book, which is basically its public web-site, on AWS, Azure, Blue Mix, or Helion, However, most of its data is in i’s own data centers. The same holds for the NSA, the FBI and their counterparts in other countries: they have their own data centers.
Jewel, also illustrating limits, courtesy Math.Yale.Edu
Similarly, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and other banks, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and other financial services companies do not use the public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms for their on-line services. When you log into any of their systems to check your balances, bank online or manage your portfolio, you are logging into THEIR systems, in THEIR data centers, managed by THEIR staff.
One final note. Amazon Redshift offers “fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service… for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1,000 per terabyte per year.”
This is written on a Dell Latitude E6410. The machine has a quad-core i7 processor, 4.0 GB of RAM, and a native 250 GB hard drive. I bought the machine used in late 2013 for less than $450 (from Computer Overhauls in New York City). I have an external 1.0 TB drive that cost me $100. I am running the 64-bit implementation of Windows 7 Pro, can install Linux in a virtual machine, and can configure Hadoop to examine a dramatically large collection of unstructured or multiply structure data. It is easier to scale on Amazon Redshift or AWS. But frankly, Redshift and AWS are expensive compared to what I can implement.
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Second in a series on the logistics of “Cloud Computing.” See also “The Wrong Way into the Cloud,” written on Popular Logistics on May 18, 2014.
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Larry Furman, the Director of Information Technology for a law firm in New York City, and a Systems Engineer with Popular Logistics, holds a BS in Biology and Computer Science and an MBA in Managing for Sustainability. Available for consulting, he can be reached at “lfurman97” at G Mail.
Image courtesy One Sage Calculus