I was having a conversation with an old colleague late Friday afternoon. (Friday was a day of former colleagues, had lunch with a great mentor). He’s responsible for infrastructure and operations for a good size company. His team is embarking on a project to migrate to the cloud as their contract for space will be up in 2020. There three things which were interesting in the discussion which I thought were interesting and probably the same issues others face on their journey to the cloud.
The first was the concern about security. The cloud is no less or more secure than your data center. If your data center is private your cloud asset can be private, if your need public facing services, they would be secured like the public facing services in your own data center. Data security is your responsibility in the cloud, but the cloud doesn’t make your data any less secure.
The other concern was the movement of VMware images to the cloud. Most of the environment was virtualized years ago. However, there are a lot of windows 2003 and 2008 servers. Windows 2008 end of support is 2020, and Windows 2003 has been out of support since July 2015. It’s odd the concern about security, given the age of the Windows environment. If it was my world, I’d probably figure out how to move those servers to Windows 2016 or retire ones no longer needed, keeping in mind OS upgrades are always dependent on the applications. Right or wrong, my roadmap would leave Windows 2003 and 2008 in whatever datacenter facility is left behind.
Lastly, there was concern about Serverless, and the application teams wanting to leverage this over his group’s infrastructure services. There was real concern about a loss of resources if the application teams turn towards Serverless, as his organization would have fewer servers (physical/virtual instances) to support. Like many technology shops, infrastructure and operations resources are formulated by the total number of servers. I find this hugely exciting. I would push resources from “keeping the lights on” to roles focused on growing the business and speed to market, which are the most significant benefit of serverless. Based on this discussion, people look at it from their own prism.
I was having a conversation with an old colleague late Friday afternoon. (Friday was a day of former colleagues, had lunch with a great mentor). He’s responsible for infrastructure and operations for a good size company. His team is embarking on a project to migrate to the cloud as their contract for space will be up in 2020. There three things which were interesting in the discussion which I thought were interesting and probably the same issues others face on their journey to the cloud.
The first was the concern about security. The cloud is no less or more secure than your data center. If your data center is private your cloud asset can be private, if your need public facing services, they would be secured like the public facing services in your own data center. Data security is your responsibility in the cloud, but the cloud doesn’t make your data any less secure.
The other concern was the movement of VMware images to the cloud. Most of the environment was virtualized years ago. However, there are a lot of windows 2003 and 2008 servers. Windows 2008 end of support is 2020, and Windows 2003 has been out of support since July 2015. It’s odd the concern about security, given the age of the Windows environment. If it was my world, I’d probably figure out how to move those servers to Windows 2016 or retire ones no longer needed, keeping in mind OS upgrades are always dependent on the applications. Right or wrong, my roadmap would leave Windows 2003 and 2008 in whatever datacenter facility is left behind.
Lastly, there was concern about Serverless, and the application teams wanting to leverage this over his group’s infrastructure services. There was real concern about a loss of resources if the application teams turn towards Serverless, as his organization would have fewer servers (physical/virtual instances) to support. Like many technology shops, infrastructure and operations resources are formulated by the total number of servers. I find this hugely exciting. I would push resources from “keeping the lights on” to roles focused on growing the business and speed to market, which are the most significant benefit of serverless. Based on this discussion, people look at it from their own prism.
