Moving education services to the cloud
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I read the title of this thread and all that I can picture is The Hudsucker Proxy
You know... for kids!
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@Breffni-Potter said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
But then again are ChromeBooks the answer combined with google apps?
If we're looking to kill as much technical support and labour as we can.
Often makes sense.
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@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
This isn't a topic on a complete overhaul necessarily. It's just what you've experienced with AWS vs. Azure (if you're in education, that's a plus).
This is pretty easy....
AWS is the best in the business, period. They are often the cheapest, definitely the fastest, most reliable, biggest, most featureful, most advanced, best supported and... hardest to use.
Azure is far from the worst... but is easily the worst major player. Their reliability and costs put them far behind AWS, Rackspace, Softlayer, Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr and others. High cost, hard to use, low reliability, poor support. But many features.
Without knowing more of why cloud computing is on the radar, it's hard to answer anything more. It's very possible that Vultr or Digital Ocean would be better options. Why is he looking at elastic scalability?
It doesn't necessarily have to be AWS or Azure... could be Digital Ocean. The conversation was just around those two since they have clear education pricing. I haven't looked into Vultr or DO having those price breaks.
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@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@JaredBusch said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
Stepping back, it is safe to assume you are really wanting to move everything.
In that case, just go with Office 365 across the board. This gets the email, documents, etc. You also get Azure AD if really wanted, and then look into the InTune pricing to go with it.
He's definitely looking to offload as much as possible. The legal side (whoever that might be) blessed any cloud offerings so where CIPA was a concern with another district, in the past, it's not anymore. So everything can be migrated.
Cloud is ambiguous here. Cloud meaning hosted? Cloud meaning cloud computing? Cloud meaning IaaS? Cloud meaning SaaS?
I'll clean that up. Cloud meaning hosting all of the servers he has in two schools.
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@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
His environment is a very low budget network that he inherited in a rural town. To put it into perspective, the town is about 325 people. The school is obviously tiny. There is an elementary and a high school/middle school combo.
Looking for clarify: There is little money in the budget in general OR historically what they have was built on a very low budget? Unsure if you are talking about his available funds or the state of affairs.
There's little money in the budget. They get some help with things like e-rate and stuff from the state, but overall the district has very little money to spend.
Then that likely rules out AWS and Azure. Those are price premium services that don't appear to apply well here.
AWS didn't look expensive when comparing to what hardware costs are, but I also haven't compared them against DO & Vultr.
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Looks like DO might offer an educational discount if you get in contact with someone, but nothing on their site that is transparent about that. Just saw something in their FAQs. Vultr, that seems to be non-existent. Might be worth him to check that out I guess.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
His environment is a very low budget network that he inherited in a rural town. To put it into perspective, the town is about 325 people. The school is obviously tiny. There is an elementary and a high school/middle school combo.
Looking for clarify: There is little money in the budget in general OR historically what they have was built on a very low budget? Unsure if you are talking about his available funds or the state of affairs.
There's little money in the budget. They get some help with things like e-rate and stuff from the state, but overall the district has very little money to spend.
Then that likely rules out AWS and Azure. Those are price premium services that don't appear to apply well here.
AWS didn't look expensive when comparing to what hardware costs are, but I also haven't compared them against DO & Vultr.
AWS is super cheap. BUT it requires a LOT of expertise. It is not designed for VPS use, it's a true and very focused IaaS cloud computing environment with the assumption of DevOps. Hard to believe that that is how your friend intends to work. But if he doesn't, AWS is going to suck.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
Looks like DO might offer an educational discount if you get in contact with someone, but nothing on their site that is transparent about that. Just saw something in their FAQs. Vultr, that seems to be non-existent. Might be worth him to check that out I guess.
Vultr supports Windows, though, I believe.
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Without knowing the workloads and reasons for looking at any of these, we are very much guessing in the dark. Why are we talking about Azure or AWS? What role will they be fulfilling?
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It might be good to go back to your friend and get a list of what he wants to run "in the cloud" and if he's open to changing his thinking on things.
For example, if he gets rid of all of the onsite servers, does he need AD anymore? If the servers are managing websites and files, he might be able to get away from AD altogether. use NextCould/ownCloud for files and the web servers, etc.
You're already using Google Apps, what aren't they providing that you need?
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@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
Without knowing the workloads and reasons for looking at any of these, we are very much guessing in the dark. Why are we talking about Azure or AWS? What role will they be fulfilling?
It could be any cloud provider... Azure, AWS, Vultr, Digital Ocean, etc. The role it's taking is eliminating the hardware in the buildings that carry higher upfront costs (refurbs are currently being purchased at a fraction of the price, but are still an added upfront cost). He's having to diagnose failing hardware when it goes down, pulling him away from other duties. Stuff like that... It's not just about saving money, it is mostly about displacing hardware that sits in the racks that add additional overhead like replacing drives/troubleshooting a faulty motherboard/etc.
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@Dashrender said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
It might be good to go back to your friend and get a list of what he wants to run "in the cloud" and if he's open to changing his thinking on things.
For example, if he gets rid of all of the onsite servers, does he need AD anymore? If the servers are managing websites and files, he might be able to get away from AD altogether. use NextCould/ownCloud for files and the web servers, etc.
You're already using Google Apps, what aren't they providing that you need?
Exactly. We are missing all of the pieces that make any of this make sense. What is the workload? Why have elastically expanding cloud computing options been listed as the only candidates? I know lots of times that AWS is the obvious answer, but none that would be obvious and could be selected without knowing the details.
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@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@Dashrender said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
It might be good to go back to your friend and get a list of what he wants to run "in the cloud" and if he's open to changing his thinking on things.
For example, if he gets rid of all of the onsite servers, does he need AD anymore? If the servers are managing websites and files, he might be able to get away from AD altogether. use NextCould/ownCloud for files and the web servers, etc.
You're already using Google Apps, what aren't they providing that you need?
Why have elastically expanding cloud computing options been listed as the only candidates?
That's why I'm here asking. Maybe I just don't know any better and could use some expertise on some different angles of approach.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
It could be any cloud provider... Azure, AWS, Vultr, Digital Ocean, etc. The role it's taking is eliminating the hardware in the buildings that carry higher upfront costs.
Well but no. Cloud computing is expressly not for that purpose. This is a total misunderstanding of the role of cloud computing.
This article is focused on private, but applies to public here as well:
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2013/06/when-to-consider-a-private-cloud/
Azure and AWS are traditional cloud, so the opposite of what you are looking for. DO and Vultr are VPS built on cloud, so far closer. There are two different categories here that you are mixing together. This is why it was critical that we get the stated intention, because the assumed answer was totally wrong for the assumed need.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@Dashrender said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
It might be good to go back to your friend and get a list of what he wants to run "in the cloud" and if he's open to changing his thinking on things.
For example, if he gets rid of all of the onsite servers, does he need AD anymore? If the servers are managing websites and files, he might be able to get away from AD altogether. use NextCould/ownCloud for files and the web servers, etc.
You're already using Google Apps, what aren't they providing that you need?
Why have elastically expanding cloud computing options been listed as the only candidates?
That's why I'm here asking. Maybe I just don't know any better and could use some expertise on some different angles of approach.
Well we need to start with the question, not with the answer. The thread led off with AWS or Azure... two nearly identical products. Basically, you already had the answer in mind. At no point as the question been asked yet. We aren't sure exactly what the question is. We are getting closer, but we are not yet there. Right now, every response is still assuming something that we don't know what led to that point, only that likely something has been overlooked. We can't evaluate in a meaningful way because we don't know what problem we are trying to solve.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
The role it's taking is eliminating the hardware in the buildings that carry higher upfront costs (refurbs are currently being purchased at a fraction of the price, but are still an added upfront cost).
This is just moving capex to opex. You can do that through leasing and financing moves. No need to fundamentally change architecture.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
He's having to diagnose failing hardware when it goes down, pulling him away from other duties.
Warranties fix that. Or support contracts.
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@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
Stuff like that... It's not just about saving money, it is mostly about displacing hardware that sits in the racks that add additional overhead like replacing drives/troubleshooting a faulty motherboard/etc.
Generally to do stuff like this you would get a Scale HC3 cluster or something like that (something with full, integrated support) and throw it in a datacenter like Colocation America has. You get the lower cost of owning your own gear (compared to the price premium of cloud) while getting the remote support and full support of the datacenter and the integrated stack vendor. @scale @ChrisL @SamieWalters
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@scottalanmiller said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
@Dashrender said in AWS vs. Azure - for Education:
It might be good to go back to your friend and get a list of what he wants to run "in the cloud" and if he's open to changing his thinking on things.
For example, if he gets rid of all of the onsite servers, does he need AD anymore? If the servers are managing websites and files, he might be able to get away from AD altogether. use NextCould/ownCloud for files and the web servers, etc.
You're already using Google Apps, what aren't they providing that you need?
Why have elastically expanding cloud computing options been listed as the only candidates?
That's why I'm here asking. Maybe I just don't know any better and could use some expertise on some different angles of approach.
The thread led off with AWS or Azure...
I cleaned up my OC and title a little bit...
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I'm the last person to say that cloud computing is bad, I love it. But it's not a panacea and it has one real purpose - elastically expanding workloads. I know of no school that can leverage that. So paying the huge monthly cost premium to get that will be painful financially. And learning the skills needed to use AWS will be costly. Vultr can alleviate much of that, but you pay a little more to move to the VPS model on top of cloud computing in that case. You still maintain the fundamental problems.
Now if your workload is so small that you can't use a single server, then things change and Vultr or DO can make a lot of sense, this is where they rock. But if you are just moving stuff out of house, this is unlikely to make much sense.
