A couple of people have both publicly and privately written about the whole “welcome to databases” question about how you get started. A few have ended up talking about technologies to avoid, and have turned to talking about technologies that are things that are better suited for prooduction.
The irony is that no one seems to agree on where the different technologies fit together and whehter they should be included in the weaponry of becoming a data professional. I thought this point was perhaps one of the more interesting in the responses.
One thing seems to be fairly common are those that don’t use the cloud (or use it much less) have brought up the stability, security and “noisy neighbor” issues more than a few times. It seems that in most cases, these folks are speaking to the virtual machine version of things – where you’re sharing cycles with others users on a server.
But this really had me wondering what the perception is where a system is on a Platform as a Service, or Software as a Service type of solution. Are those environments better in terms of performance, control and the like? What do you think of those?
A few things seem to be bubbling around the surface a bit that certainly suggest cloud has some challenges to address. First is indeed security of the platform. Not in the sense that people were worried about initially – I think the systems are locked down and protected and I think some great tools are out there for encryption, access controls and the like. Those same tools are often deployed in an on-premise solution. Which is exactly the issue.
With a cloud provider, the attack reward is astronomically larger than an on-premise solution. So what many people are most concerned about when I talk to them specifically about security, is the fact that the cloud providers are such a huge target – that even if vulnerabilities aren’t (yet) known, the potential and therefor draw of breaking in is too significant to ignore. It’s a little bit of “buying trouble” but I see the point. This is where proper configuration (VPCs and other protections) come into play.
If we set aside security, do you think performance and independence of your own performance is solved in the SaaS and PaaS models? Do these solve that issue of noisy neighbors? Or do you anticipate that you’ll still have those same issues?
I do believe there is a difference in a positive way. But I have no data at the moment to back that up. I just go on what I’ve seen with our own performance in the different environment approaches and it does seem to me that the VM is the most risky.
So, what say you?