Thread: Cloud computing
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Old 6th April 2019
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,984
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If you are buying a service, the underlying technology doesn't matter. Really. What matters is the service itself, and what it does or does not do. If that service requires privacy, authenticity, and authentication, then these are part of the purchase decision.

At $DAYJOB, there are a variety of "cloud" services purchased. There's plenty of SaaS, where an application is hosted by the application vendor. For any of these applications, no one involved in deployment or use care about the hosting platform's OS. What is cared about is the safety and security of the data, including controls for PII if applicable, safe harbor regulatory issues if applicable, integration of the application's data with other $DAYJOB applications, and then performance, availablity, and costs.

There are also thousands of virtual servers, running various OSes, and the host platforms at the service providers don't matter. What matters are the specific services offered by each of the providers.

As a personal example, I don't care that the Tarsnap service I purchase happens to run back-end services on FreeBSD VPSes running on Amazon's Linux-based AWS hosts. Nor do I care that they store my data using Amazon's EC2 services. What matters to me is that my data is deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted before it leaves my clients, and stored in three different geographies before the client is told the data has been successfully delivered. And I like the service's key managment, costs, and responsive support.
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