Recently, I have been thinking more about my future and where I want to dedicate my time and effort in the coming months. A lot of this thought has come from personal changes in my home life as well as new priorities which have arisen because of it. As many of you know I am in University full-time. This has to be my number one priority in life as my degree is important to my future ambitions. I'm also sure many of you know that I plan to join the Army in the UK after I finish University in 2024. With my beginning the process of joining the Army I have to dedicate more energy to this in terms of fitness and other personal development. This means I am no longer able to dedicate as much time or energy to stuff which I do enjoy. What I'm mainly referring to is Modern Hosting.
I have worked/ran Modern Hosting now for over two years, with me starting it along with Modern_Mo in May of 2020, shortly after the pandemic began. We started Modern Hosting with an ambition to take over the Unturned Hosting Scene and wider Game Market. For a long time, we dominated and are still one of two/three major players in the Unturned Hosting Market. However, my interest in management and the company has decreased. Along with the other things going on in my life, I have recently started to work with Pine Hosting in a more tech-related role with less management which I enjoy more than the work I formerly did at Modern. I find the work I do at Pine Hosting to be more stable as well as have a greater enjoyment factor for my current lifestyle around my other current ambitions.
With this, I announce my resignation as General Manager at Modern Hosting and with that my part ownership of the company. This has been a hard decision to make. Modern Hosting has been a large part of my life over the last two years and certainly has taken me a long way in my understanding of lots of aspects of running a business and a hosting company and I can gladly say that I wouldn't be in the position I am now without Modern Mo and Dominic. They gave taught me an awful lot and will always remain my friends. Sadly, everything good must come to an end and with that is my time at Modern Hosting. I wish all the best for Modern Hosting and the team there in their future ambitions.
I will be continuing my work at Pine Hosting and still attempting to interact with the Unturned community wherever I can, I'm not going far. Just not involved with Modern Hosting.
Thank you for reading and I will see you around :)
1.0 - Introduction
Cloud computing is a relatively new concept only becoming mainstream in the last 30 years or so which allows users on-demand availability of computer system resources. In which they do not directly manage and instead access from a third-party provider. Cloud computing has many different applications and implementations with some of the most popular beings for direct computing power and large application data storage. The cloud computing market is one of the fastest markets growing in the IT industry with it projected to be worth over $1.2 Trillion by the year 2028 [9].
One company that holds most of the market share as a cloud provider is Amazon Web Services, which is a subsidiary of Amazon, it was created specifically for providing Cloud services.AWS is arguably a market leader holding a significant share compared to similar providers offering the same or similar cloud services. Thecloud provider'ss size is increasing with over 1 million current users as of 2020 [8]. This shows the increasing emergence of the cloud in our society.
Figure 1 Shows how cloud providers' profits have increased from the previous years (2017-2018) - [11]
In recent years the use of cloud computing in our everyday lives have become more commonplace, but why is this? There are a few arguments for the cloud one of them is that it’s a central processing use case, which means that users move their applications to the cloud meaning they can access them in a simple, fast, and controlled way. Before the existence of cloud computing, most applications were stored on users’ personal computers, over time these applications got bigger and required more resources for computing and data storage, increasing these resources is expensive and perhaps not cost-effective for someone to upgrade every time they want to store some more photos for example. We have seen this thought of cloud computing over the last 20 years but in more modern times there are greater arguments for cloud computing, the current one is the cloud enables more complex IT infrastructures which is not possible on a local machine scale [6].
2.0 - The uses of Cloud
2.1 - Use of Cloud in Education
As mentioned previously one of the main benefits of the cloud is the ability to it be on-demand and flexible and only having to pay for what they use in terms of resources [3]. Previously if researchers wanted to run complex simulations that required a vast amount of computing power, the institution would have to have their own hardware to do said research in their own datacentre environment which they would control, this is known as on-premise. Since the emergence of cloud solutions, it is now possible for researchers to launch complex simulations on the cloud. This has made research more accessible as the cloud is a cheaper alternative to on-premise datacentres because their organizations do not actually need to pay for the hardware and manage it themselves as on-premise has large maintenance and upfront costs [4]. With the cloud as well, there is no software licensing costs. With a large enterprise infrastructure, one main serious price factor is the software prices required to use the hardware associated with it. One example would be cisco networking software setting you back $1000 per router or switch it's used have in some cases [12], there are many other examples of this in the commercial hardware space, these costs increase the larger the scale of the infrastructure. Of course, price is relevant in other sectors, but I find it is shown in greater detail in education where budgets are tighter and research more important.
One other factor which is important to discuss in terms of discouraged use of on-premises infrastructure for research is to do with the hardware itself. Research simulations often require vast amounts of computing power, so the latest and best hardware is needed to perform these simulations or research. One problem with on-premise solutions is that you must upgrade this hardware yourself and at this current time more powerful processors and faster storage mediums are being released every year or even sooner. This would mean that to have the best research environment the organization would have to invest heavily into upgraded hardware every time faster and better hardware is released, they may not have the budget for this as the costs are high. With the cloud, the provider upgrades the hardware. These providers often have larger budgets to spend on providing the best for their clients for this so they can offer it when the organization that is using their own hardware in a data centre may not.
Not only has the cloud improved research in educational organizations it has also improved learning. In more modern times we have seen the need to create flexible learning environments due to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 as well as for other reasons such as online universities [1]. The cloud allowed a lot of educational establishments to continue offering their education to their students through the time lockdowns that were occurring in many countries across the world. During this time there have been many new software technologies using the cloud which allow video and voice communication amongst numerous individuals at once, one of these being notably zoom which during the pandemic was used to simulate a classroom or lecture theatres commonly seen in educational establishments, this benefited students, so their education wasn’t put on hold during the pandemic [7].
2.2 - Use of Cloud in Healthcare
Cloud computing technology is gaining significant use in sectors such as healthcare, one of its main uses is managing the use of patient data for it to be easily shared between medical institutions. Not only does this save time but also saves costs as before the emergence of the cloud individual medical records would of have to off been kept in storage and then accessed when needed and only off been able to be accessed on a local area network or in one location. Now though wherever a patient is being treated their medical records can be accessed from the cloud [5].
3.0 Limitations of Cloud
Although there are many benefits of cloud computing for society, individual users, and businesses there are also some drawbacks relating to the general use of the technology.
3.1 Privacy and Security of Data
One of the main concern and limitations of cloud computing is over the control of data, in a cloud environment users’ data is distributed amongst a cloud provider infrastructure. Privacy and data security are big issues. Someone with malicious intent such as an eavesdropper or even malware could become a threat to the end-user of the cloud computing solution.
When using cloud computing clients must have complete faith in the service provider for the security of their data. For this reason, small companies with limited resources who may have a lack of trust in these big cloud-providing companies may choose to use on-premise rather than cloud solutions for their infrastructure [2].
3.2 Service Availability
Although cloud is extremely scalable and distributed there is also a concern for the user in terms of availability, because the servers which the end-user is using are not managed or owned by them and instead a cloud provider it is possible that the services could become unavailable unexpectedly and there is nothing the end-user can do to fix it and restore service for them or their customers if it’s an issue with the cloud providers infrastructure [2]. Research has shown that 47% of users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40% will leave to another website if it’s after 3 seconds. With this, it shows that service unavailability is not an option for a customer of these cloud providers as they will be potentially losing traffic and revenue with this research also reporting an average loss of $5,600 per one minute of downtime [10].
3.3 Vendor Lock In
Although not really a concern for an end-user, it’s important for businesses and organizations that we have discussed. Cloud computing is very vendor dependent as there are many different cloud providers offering a wide range of different services and architectures for their own systems, moving data between cloud providers can be tricky and hard for a business to conduct. It is also hard when organizations are larger as there is more data to move, because of this organizations have little to no choice about moving away from cloud solutions or changing to a different service provider once they have started using them [2].
Vendor lock-in can also be considered in terms of cost, as an organization is paying hourly or monthly for the services it's hard for them to just stop paying this if their infrastructure is reliant on a cloud provider. With on-premise solutions (if the organization owns its own data centre) they do not have these monthly costs but instead, there is a large upfront cost.
4.0 Conclusion
In this report we explored the brief emergence of the cloud as well as its practical benefits in a few sub-sectors in our societies, we also looked at some of its limitations of it. In conclusion, I amongst many organizations believe that cloud technology has been extremely useful to society, The benefits that the cloud gives I do believe the way the limitations as a lot of the limitations can be mitigated if they are managed correctly.
References
Academic Papers
[1] Jose A Gonzalez-Martínez, Miguel L Bote-Lorenzo, Eduardo Gomez-Sanchez, and Rafael Cano-Parra. 2014. Cloud computing and education: A state-of-the-art survey. Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain. Retrieved from https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0360131514001985?token=0B1F1B2FFD6793F9B9E76E85540A592CB2E89779ECF735917E621488456F279E0306FF6001665F0975E22FE4AB5C24AF&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20211121192626
[2] Mohammad Manzurul Islam, Sarwar Morshed, and Parijat Goswami. 2013. Cloud Computing: A Survey on its limitations and Potential Solutions. IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues 10, 4 (July 2013), 5.
[3] Saju Mathew. 2012. Implementation of Cloud Computing in Education - A Revolution. International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering 4, 3 (June 2012), 3.
[4] Nabil Sultan 2014. Making use of cloud computing for healthcare provision: Opportunities and challenges. (January 2014), 8.
[5] Nabil Sultan. Cloud computing for education: A new dawn? International Journal of Information Management 30, 8.
[6] L. Wang, A. Younge, and G. von Laszewski. Cloud Computing: A Perspective Study. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00354-008-0081-5
Other Sources
[7] Surattana Adipat. 2021. Why Web-Conferencing Matters: Rescuing Education in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis. (September 2021). Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.752522/full
[8] John Cave. 2020. Who’s Using Amazon Web Services? [2020 Update]. Contino.IO. Retrieved November 19, 2021 from https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws#:~:text=A%20Look%20at%20AWS%20Users,least%2010%25%20of%20that%20total.
[9] Grand View Research INC. 2021. Cloud Computing Market Size Worth $1251.09 Billion By 2028 | CAGR 19.1%: Grand View Research, Inc. prnewswire. Retrieved September 19, 2021 from https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cloud-computing-market-size-worth-1251-09-billion-by-2028--cagr-19-1-grand-view-research-inc-301366888.html#:~:text=1%2C%202021%20%2FPRNewswire%2F%20%2D%2D,by%20Grand%20View%20Research%2C%20Inc.
[10] Blair Felter. 2019. Top 5 Ways System Downtime can Impact Your Company. vxchnge. Retrieved November 21, 2021 from https://www.vxchnge.com/blog/ways-system-downtime-could-impact-company
[11] Felix Richter. 2019. Amazon Captures 32% of $80 Billion Cloud Market. Statista. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/chart/7994/cloud-market-share/
[12] 2021. Cisco License Software List & Pricing. greentecsystems. Retrieved November 21, 2021 from https://www.greentecsystems.com/product/cisco-license-software-list-pricing/
Introduction
Hello! My name is Edward Brook im a 18 year old (mainly student) from Surrey which is a county south west of London in the United Kingdom! This is my first every blog post where i am intending to just talk a bit about what i do and what i am going to be writing about to see if you want to read in the future. Please do cut me some slack however, i am very new to this so it may take me some time to get my boots of the ground.
What do i do currently?
In between my Computer Science degree which i have recently started at Swansea University, i manage, develop and part own a relativley small game service provider. We currently host only games servers and dedicated server but we are looking to expand our offerings in the future. I mainly do it as a side job/project but i enjoy it and thats what matters most for me, its also a massive learning experience in running a buisness ontop of developing and managing the systems needed for our speicifc buisness.
With the buisness i have become relativley increasingly interested with software engineering aswell as system administration which i have needed to be more direct hands on with to run the company, and thats what this blog is going to be mainly about. I intend to create guides, talk about current systems i use ontop of bringing you all along for the ride of using and learning new ones. I will talk more in depth about the tools and my busisness in a seperate blog post which will come soon.
Along top of my computer sciencey related side of my life i also have a few other side hobbies which are changing and developing all the time. I am a massive drone flyer and cinematographer with my current main drone being a DJI FPV and i am also currently just starting my journey to join the british army as a officer after i graudate university. So i may also be documenting my experience and development within these hobbies.
What did i use to do
Most of my past experience in the field of computer science and hobbies have all been relativley beginner so should really be treated as such, we all have to start somewhere at the end of the day.
I have a decent amount of past managerial work and most of the work i did inspired me to start my current game server provider in march of last year. I have run multiple small to medium sized game servers from Minecraft to Unturned, a few successfull a few not so successfull but all have been a learning experience and deffinitly gave me the starting ground i needed in managing game servers to start the company. Ontop of this sort of basic managerial/development of game servers i have also worked for a couple large social media influencers in terms of running discords aswell as there own game servers/buisnesses. Most recently Blairs Brainiacs which i resigned from in May of this year where i was the operations manager ontop of being a small time developer controlling the 30,000 person discord and some small internal systems.