AWS has a lousy hybrid cloud story. VMware may fix that soon VMware and Amazon Web Services are reportedly about to stage a public display of affection. Fortune reckons the two have been having intimate chats about the same kind of relationship Virtzilla has with IBM. That cloudy tryst sees IBM offer VMware's service-provider-grade-vSphere-as-a-service, the better to help VMware users …
Ultimately all these different providers do exactly the same thing just with different APIs and GUIs.
All someone really needs to do is to write a big translation shim layer and we're off in cross-cloud nerdvana. Heck, you can even retrieve pricing programmatically, so you can probably get it to automatically pick the cheapest cloud...
What someone needs to do is make it easy.
It is simple to set up a basic hypervisor and test drive a virtual machine or two - it's probably why there was such a strong uptake of virtualisation (although Vmware's vere changing terms and product names really don't help themselves here). AWS storage is also quite easy.
However to create a VM backup in the cloud with secure VPN access (as simple as thought the cloud layer appears as just another hypervisor host/cluster) takes a fair bit of research and it is difficult to estimate what the costs will be. You will also need to get a few different AWS products working.
It is fine if that is a defined project that you are undertaking and have set aside a good deal of time to look into it, but not easy if you just want to try it out as a simple pre-project feasibility study or trying to set it up in an emergency when you just want to fire up a backup as your hardware is toast (of course best practice would suggest you don't leave it until then to try to set it up, but sometimes you can find yourself in that situation).
The "easy button" is to blame for the awful lot of incompetent IT "professionals" out there, imagine if doctors, astronauts, electric engineers and so on, where asking for an easy button as an excuse to not read the F.... manual. At least 50% of the time of a competent IT professional should be spent building up their knowledge, not just hitting easy buttons over and over again. It is irresponsible to choose a solution based solely on "easy to use" rather than functionality because the IT "professional" is too darn lazy to learn new tricks.
Bullshit. Of course doctors, astronauts, electric engineers and so on use the easy button. All the goddamned time, in fact.
Doctors, for example, don't clean, sharpen and sterilize their own tools. They don't mix their own drugs. They don't research those drugs. Most of the time they rely on software to assist with diagnoses by running through checklists. Medicine is also a discipline of multiple specialties. Doctors - even specialists - routinely rely on tools, techniques, technologies and more that they themselves could not reproduce in order to do their jobs. Without these tools they wouldn't have a prayer of meeting the survival rates or the patients/day goals that are set for them.
I can say very similar things about astronauts, electric engineers and even the dudes who run around the forest on minimum wage planting trees. They sure as all hell wouldn't be making their quoats without someone else growing the seedlings and more someones making their boots, packs, hole-creation gear, etc.
This notion that anyone in today's society can be self-sufficient - even within the scope of a single profession - is complete and utter bullshit. Humanity is the most interconnected and interdependent species on the plant. Ants got nothing on us.
"Doctors, for example, don't clean, sharpen and sterilize their own tools... I can say very similar things about astronauts, electric engineers..."
At least they know what's going on when they hit the easy button, unlike most IT "professionals" I have known, the majority of businesses running on Windows is the perfect example, easy of use over reliability and functionality.
No they don't. You really don't know much about the medical profession, do you? Sterilizing and cleaning tools is it's own profession. Complete with it's own tools, rapidly evolving technology and techniques and more.
A Doctor might have some very basic idea of what' going on "they are removing physical detritus and trying to kill all the bacteria and viruses", but I promise you most doctors don't actually know how that's accomplished. What those doctors are taught is essentially history. "These were the ways we mostly/kind-of-sort-of killed off bacteria in the past". Things like ethanol, fire, etc.
Of course, it's 2016, not 1816, and we know little bit more about the world now. There are all sorts of nasties that can stay on instruments, even after what many would consider to be rigorous attempts at sterilization. This is especially true in hospitals, where the oogly booglies have been in a constant state of evolutionary overdrive in an attempt to survive.
So now we're in to things like pulsed sonic detritus removal, acid baths, ionizing radiation, silver and/or copper coating/recoating, plus like a thrillion layers of testing at different intervals. That's before we get into the procedures around length of reuse before replacement, order of operations, number of cycles between different events, etc.
As a general rule, no. The Doctor doesn't know that stuff. Certainly not to the level of detail you are clearly demanding IT folks "know" what is going on under the hood.
it's also a completely irrational position for you to take. Nobody - and I mean nobody, not even your own over-inflated opinion of yourself - can understand everything there is to understand about IT. No human brain is even close to big enough. The true "full stack engineer" is biologically impossible.
Real human beings in the 21st century rely on understanding the basics. We then understand specifics about things we need to understand in order to do our jobs. For everything else there's reference material. Usually a user manual and/or Google.
So climb down off your high horse, mate. You aren't fooling anyone who actually is an IT professional. Actually being a professional means a sense of humility. It's required in any profession because admitting what you don't know is absolutely critical.
The difference between the apprentice and the master is that the apprentice thinks they know everything when, in fact, they know nothing. The master thinks then know nothing when, in fact, they have forgotten more than most practitioners will ever know.
'The "easy button" is to blame for the awful lot of incompetent IT "professionals" '
Geez, is this one of those willy waving contests where unless you program in pure binary, have to compile your shell each time before you send a command to your self-patched OS and the kit you have doesn't use USB, just a single RS232 output to a green screen terminal you aren't a real IT professional?
Get back to the real world - you can still be a competent IT professional and still prefer things to be easy to make you job easier so you can get on with the key parts of your role. A lot of IT can be easy - not dumbed down - just easy. It can still be powerful, but the same way that as an IT professional you are trying to make life easier for your users, the same applies to yourself. It also doesn't have anything to do with laziness, I guess your view is the requirement to have an IT god and you worry that if IT gets too easy then you will be replaceable. However there is way more to IT than being able to do certain tasks easily.
Sometimes you don't want (or more often haven't got the spare time) to read through pre-install guides, set up guides, search for definitive best practice recommendations (which never seem to exist), or even go on the suppliers training course, just to evaluate a product or work out whether it is suitable for your environment (or even get you temporarily out of a hole).
If you decide to make an investment in the product and it will become a key part of your systems then as part of the roll out project you can add budget for proper training.
"flagship vSphere private cloud"
vSphere is not and never has been a private cloud. It's a hypervisor. To make a cloud with VMware you actually need a whole bunch of other products to meet the definition of cloud as defined nicely by NIST.
The truth is that most organisations don't need a cloud at all, and virtual infrastructure does perfectly well for them. With a 5 year refresh cycle why would I need a self service portal and full automation and charge back? Many organisations do need this, just like a few need NSX or vSAN or any other new and trendy stuff, but that doesn't make the traditional stuff any less effective.
I thought the whole point of the 'Cloud' was to eliminate the expense of maintaining your own hardware.
"That cloudy tryst sees IBM offer VMware's service-provider-grade-vSphere-as-a-service, the better to help VMware users extend into hybrid clouds."
What?
For good or ill, regulatory compliance remains a major issue as to where you data and applications live and work. PCI-DSS, GDPR, the zoo of US regulations, even the "simple" issues of customer privacy.... That's before we even look at the intelligence communities.
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