The Cloud Sucks And Here's Why
Posted 9 years ago
Wow, the cloud sure does suck. But that doesn't seem fair. Your Digital Ocean account is fine. Your Dropbox you use to share your family photos is the greatest thing since sliced bread! In fact your mom has never been happier. So why does it suck?
1) Arbitrary restrictions and limits
Your client asks to upload their forms to a server. Your boss tells you Google App Engine is amazing for this. You can manage your stack from the cloud, and you can support all the greatest languages! Once you get onto the cloud, you realize that servers will shut down whenever they feel like. Well actually, they will shutdown when Google tells them to shutdown. And if you don't want your server to shutdown, you can pay Google more money by upgrading to a B8 or some nonsense.
Google will also tell you how big your file size can be. Do you want to upload a 50mB payload? You are out of luck my friend, because the Google App Engine will tell you 32mB is all you need.
Do you think it would be useful for your database to write more than 16mB to a row? Well I hope you don't. Because Google Cloud Sql doesn't allow that. In fact, their cloud sql support is so limited that nobody is around to raise that restriction.
The only Google cloud service I would recommend is their Apps for (small) Business, GMail, Drive, etc for your work. That is pretty decent. Their cloud services stink.
2) New providers = weakness
Dropbox, Box, Drive, Evernote, EC2, S3, Linode, Digital Ocean, bunch of Google crap, and so many more cloud services who will kill for your business. The cloud is definitely the future of technology infrastructure, but in these early phases there is much chaff to be split. It is important to realize that when you sign up for a cloud service, you are agreeing to the weakness of someone elses' technology. Your customer cannot bring more performance requirements than Dropbox can handle, otherwise you are shit out of luck.
For many projects, it is easy to predict the performance needs, and it is safe to say Linode or DO will be adequate for your work. But there are many projects where the scale is not yet known. But there are even more projects with people who don't understand what a software project needs.
There are thousands of software project managers out there who don't realize their customer needs to upload 100mB data, and then tells developers to 'get it on the cloud', as if that edict will make everything perfect. Then the developer comes back and says 'Google doesn't allow us to upload 100mB' and the project manager acts like the developer is lying, and it is uncomfortable for everyone involved.
This is insanely successful marketing by cloud companies, and it results in big money for them. Unfortunately it turns into a huge problem for developers who are stuck with this weakness.
3) Shitty Documentation
Your boss tells you to start developing with this new cloud host. You check out the API documentation and try out some examples. None of them work. You spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out if it is your computer, or if there is something wrong in your code, or maybe the parameters aren't being passed correctly.
At the end of the day you send an email to customer service. The next day they tell you the API endpoint has changed, and they let you know they are very sorry. Sorry indeed.
When you deal with such a new product, it is easy to hit stale documentation. And newer products are also lacking in community support.
4) You can't send an email
Back in the early days of hosting, you could send your email from your own host. Sure you had to worry about Postfix and Sendmail and Dovecot and Exim and port 25, 587 and TLS and SSL and 100 other things, but at least your mail would send. Today your cloud host is probably blacklisted by GMail and Yahoo! Mail and and every other major mail service.
It is easy to send spam from cloud hosts and people often do. This results in IP addresses getting blacklisted by major mail providers. Cloud hosts often recycle their IP addresses to their numerous instances that are always going up and coming down. That cloud slice you just put up? Who knows what the last owner was doing with the IP address.
Conclusion
The cloud is great because it makes things cheaper for hosting providers and it makes things cheaper for customers. We don't pay for what we don't need. And hosts can allocate expensive resources to people who need it. But cloud hosting is still a brave new world, despite how quickly it's grown up. When we commit our apps to a cloud hosted world, we should understand the limitations of the host, and be prepared to work within those constraints.
As a software project owner you should be acutely aware of the limitations of the cloud. Never attempt to do more in the cloud than can be expected by your host. Make sure you understand the restrctions and tiered pricing plans your cloud provider imposes.
As a developer, you should be clear and direct about the limitations in the cloud to your software project manager. It is important for developers to speak up against these issues because if we do not, cloud hosts will never fix these problems. Maybe with patience and communication we can fix these issues for good.
About the authorDev/Code/Hack is a technology and business blog by me, Par Trivedi. I'm a software engineer and I've been writing code and managing teams for over a decade. This blog serves as a way to share thoughts and ideas about the tech/startup community, and also to educate newcomers to software development.
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Having had a teacher that drove the importance of using the correct capitalization when using SI prefixes, this drives me crazy. I don’t believe many of use speak in terms of milibytes, M vs m = Mega vs mili just as B vs b = Byte vs bit. Hey at least you got the latter correct where a lot don’t.
Its not about the user ... it's about management. When the system gets hacked they can say, "It's not us, it's the cloud." And when I lose a years worth of work and the IT department doesn't back it up, the IT department can say, "Its not our fault, contact MS>"
I just spent 3 hours typing a document in word. My company demands we save to Onedrive. I saved to Onedrive, it took over a minute to save. At the top, it read “Saved”. I closed out of the document to restart my computer, and low and behold, the file cannot be found. It shows up in my recents, but when i attempt to open it asks me if I moved or deleted it? I Fucking hate everything about Cloud services. I hate Office 365. I hate cloud storage. It all sucks.
Cheaper for customers? Not so much, certainly not cheaper for product. I can rent a bare metal server of a capacity more than adequate for many a development stack for 1/4th the price of virtual servers on AWS or Google clouds with comparable performance or less. The tide is turning. And it has the advantage of a customized to exact needs stack rather than developers spending much of their time fighting with vendor specific cloud offerings and limitations rather than spending their time on the actual product development and evolution.
"Cloud" has been more buzzword than technology from the beginning. So far, I haven't found anything that works better on "the cloud" than on a $20/month VPS. Sure, if you write slow code you will need a lot of grunt to power it, maybe EC2 can help you with that.
cloud suck, i prefer local Archives for my office, cloud is slower than local nas, is more likely easier to hack and unreliable in general
We'are using Google Cloud from last one and half years and believe me you've told half the story. Actually it badly sucks. absolute frustration and nothing else. Below are a few untold reasons: 1) Cannot send emails from server, existing setup needs changes to integrate to third party paid services. 2) Console and APIs are broken every other day. 3) Developer are full with ego. 4) Illogical construction of APIs and solutions, even earlier the way of connecting from compute instance to SQL instance was whole shit. 5) They are very proud of their Anycast IP based HTTP Load Balancer, which they claim reduces the latency between user's client and the compute instance. But, actually it increases the latency. In our case, using the HTTP Load Balancer, for 80% of the HTTP GET requests the latency from India to USA IOWA instance is 440 MS where as without using HTTP Load Balancer the latency for 100% HTTP GET requests is 240 MS. Initially, we recommended to GC to others but now we're feeling ashamed. Lastly, the cloud console is again broken from last 3-4 days that we cannot even launch a new instance and I'm sure Google team will take another 3-4 days to fix such big mistakes. With the incident it was clear to me today, that Google teams don't even test what they are deploying to production servers because they don't care for their customer. All are just words. If you don't believe me then just look at the basic HTTP Load Balancing feature requested and needed by almost every cloud user but pending from last one and half years: (Redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS when using the HTTP(S) Load Balancer) https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904733 The above given example is just one of them. Google engineers are very rigidly opinionated towards technical elegance of the solutions in there own perspectives rather being customer centric. Google Cloud is for Google others are just tenants (second citizens).
Finally, after three weeks Google Team has woke up: https://status.cloud.google.com//incident/developers-console/17005
stop using the cloud instead of getting continuos problems and get everything local
telepor
It does, agreed ++
Yes 1Tb agreement and more!! The Cloud sells an illusion of lies to ignorant executives then screws us in the process. More over, what if internet goes down? It does......never at a good time. Cloud should be for backup and nothing else. Imagine having a wallet in the cloud....u go to pay and its down.
i think digitaloceans is the most suck cloud hosting
what do you think of linode $5 hosting?
I have MS Office 2013. Microsoft offer OneNote 2016 for free. I tried installing it only to be told, it is not compatible with Office 2013. It suggests would I like to uninstall Office 2013. I have the basic Office 2013 package, I need Outlook 2013, but the Microsoft no longer sells the 2013 edition. Why should I throw away Office 2013, which I paid for?. In a sense, I am being forced to upgrade to Office 2016. MS Word, has been around for 20+ years. MS are still trying to milk money out of it. Office 2016 is rated 2.5 stars on Microsoft Store, so forcing people to renting Office 365. So as to milk a rental model, but people at the mercy of Microsoft, who could change favourite features month on month. Customers have no control. Is the data stored in the Cloud safe and secure? How many hacks have we seen?. Companies open themselves to prosecution, if they loose customer data. Nor will Microsoft offer older version of say MS Office 2010, for those with smaller pockets. They are forcing people to use LibreOffice.....
I'm already seeing just how bad the Cloud is when it comes to hosting wordpress - I've spent more time on hold with BlueHost over the last month than I've had to call CS in the last 7 years. Sites are constantly going down or taking anywhere from 2-4 minutes to load. This is ridiculous.
I totally agree with you that "cloud" services totally suck. There are some services that really lend themselves to cloud operation, but there are others that really should never have even contemplated being on the cloud in the first place. Cloud services are great for software companies, because (a) they can bill you for the same software into perpetuity, and (b) if you dont pay they can hold your data hostage until you do. I right now am fencing with a CRM company because I want their standalone version and they are really pushing the cloud version and subscription model. The old standalone version of the software was very fast and it costed $199 per user license. The new model? $650 per year per license plus a $500 mandatory "maintenance" fee. If I want the standalone version, which is like pulling teeth to get information on because they are pushing the cloud version so hard, they want $799 per seat plus the $500 maintenance fee plus $999 in installation fees; making what a few years ago cost about $600 for a 3 user configuration cost about $4000. Or of course I could use their cloud version and be out only $1800 per year forever. Of course also they can't sell the old version and if you want to add licenses they force you to upgrade to the subscription model. I get it. It's great for the company to have recurring revenue. Not so great for the customer.