Microsoft Cloud is down- is the future in the cloud?

[The Minsky Moment]

An interesting argument I heard the other day about why AI is just a fad came onto Google Stadia- that cloud gaming is completely backwards thinking. Computers are cheap and plentiful. Its reliable ultra fast internet that is a rare commodity in the world. For most people it will never make more sense to play a game on a computer hundreds of miles away rather than just hooking one up to your TV.

Thoughts?

Chromebooks and low spec computers are cheap and plentiful, high spec computers are big and expensive or less big and really expensive.  The AAA gaming ecosystem is built around high-cost hardware and planned hardware obsolescence, a nasty combination.   Cloud gaming can liberate the user from the GPU upgrade treadmill, but even more importantly, it liberates the user from dedicated hardware, period.  You can play on any device (screen) you want in virtually any form factor.

Yes fast and reliable internet connections aren't available everywhere in the world, but where they are available it makes that service attractive. And the value and use cases of building out network infrastructure go well beyond gaming so investment will continue to pour in.

[viper37]

An interesting argument I heard the other day about why AI is just a fad came onto Google Stadia- that cloud gaming is completely backwards thinking. Computers are cheap and plentiful. Its reliable ultra fast internet that is a rare commodity in the world. For most people it will never make more sense to play a game on a computer hundreds of miles away rather than just hooking one up to your TV.

Thoughts?

Chromebooks and low spec computers are cheap and plentiful, high spec computers are big and expensive or less big and really expensive.  The AAA gaming ecosystem is built around high-cost hardware and planned hardware obsolescence, a nasty combination.  Cloud gaming can liberate the user from the GPU upgrade treadmill, but even more importantly, it liberates the user from dedicated hardware, period.  You can play on any device (screen) you want in virtually any form factor.

Yes fast and reliable internet connections aren't available everywhere in the world, but where they are available it makes that service attractive. And the value and use cases of building out network infrastructure go well beyond gaming so investment will continue to pour in.

Cloud gaming has too much latency for most games to be played reliably on ultra high graphics, it requires lowering graphic quality.

It's good for certain types of games, not good for others.

It's always going to be a niche product, never be of mass appeal like PC or console.  That is, until we can fix the problem with very high speed internet connections being available everywhere and not just for a tiny portion of the population (upload and download)

[Tonitrus]

Interestingly, our school (which runs quite a bit using Microsoft platforms) chose today tell everyone to stay home and run a "virtual class" stress test. 

However, we also mostly use MacOS operating systems...and had no apparent issues.

[DontSayBanana]

Today's outage was way less about cloud versus on-prem and way more about letting go of the reins on software updates.

Best practice used to be "download the update and try it out on a canary system, then only release it into the wild after seeing it didn't make the canary's organs liquidate and pour out of every orifice."

Then the bean counters started whining about things like opportunity cost and time to market, and now all the expectations are to release things so fast that you only notice the dead canary briefly as a blurry image now that your eyeballs are turning to goop, too.

PS - Azure was so heavily affected because a lot of "platform as a service" offerings just spin up a Windows virtual machine under the hood anyway, frequently from a template supplied by the customer, which may very well include the Crowdstrike Falcon sensor rolled into the base image because SECURITAH. Take it from someone who has operated an Azure tenant that cost $20mil in a month (we had to work to get it down to $8mil/mo- Microsoft has gone on record saying we have one of the biggest tenants in their cloud and have a hard time keeping up with it because of ALL the resources we're running).

[crazy canuck]

Interestingly, our school (which runs quite a bit using Microsoft platforms) chose today tell everyone to stay home and run a "virtual class" stress test. 

However, we also mostly use MacOS operating systems...and had no apparent issues.

So... it was planned 

[Caliga]

Today's outage was way less about cloud versus on-prem and way more about letting go of the reins on software updates.

Best practice used to be "download the update and try it out on a canary system, then only release it into the wild after seeing it didn't make the canary's organs liquidate and pour out of every orifice."

Then the bean counters started whining about things like opportunity cost and time to market, and now all the expectations are to release things so fast that you only notice the dead canary briefly as a blurry image now that your eyeballs are turning to goop, too.

PS - Azure was so heavily affected because a lot of "platform as a service" offerings just spin up a Windows virtual machine under the hood anyway, frequently from a template supplied by the customer, which may very well include the Crowdstrike Falcon sensor rolled into the base image because SECURITAH. Take it from someone who has operated an Azure tenant that cost $20mil in a month (we had to work to get it down to $8mil/mo- Microsoft has gone on record saying we have one of the biggest tenants in their cloud and have a hard time keeping up with it because of ALL the resources we're running).

This is a good assessment of what happened.

I have noticed at my company QA is getting sloppier and sloppier too, and management pressures our developers to get out enhancements "NOW NOW NOW", because.... well, "because" 

As more of the systems I manage get forced into clouds and onto SaaS platforms, we no longer have much of an opportunity to QA anything; the vendor supposedly does it but I don't honestly believe our primary ERP vendor has a real QA team at all anymore, given how sloppy and bug-ridden most of their rollouts have become.

[The Minsky Moment]

An interesting argument I heard the other day about why AI is just a fad came onto Google Stadia- that cloud gaming is completely backwards thinking. Computers are cheap and plentiful. Its reliable ultra fast internet that is a rare commodity in the world. For most people it will never make more sense to play a game on a computer hundreds of miles away rather than just hooking one up to your TV.

Thoughts?

Chromebooks and low spec computers are cheap and plentiful, high spec computers are big and expensive or less big and really expensive.  The AAA gaming ecosystem is built around high-cost hardware and planned hardware obsolescence, a nasty combination.  Cloud gaming can liberate the user from the GPU upgrade treadmill, but even more importantly, it liberates the user from dedicated hardware, period.  You can play on any device (screen) you want in virtually any form factor.

Yes fast and reliable internet connections aren't available everywhere in the world, but where they are available it makes that service attractive. And the value and use cases of building out network infrastructure go well beyond gaming so investment will continue to pour in.

Cloud gaming has too much latency for most games to be played reliably on ultra high graphics, it requires lowering graphic quality.

I use GeForce now and I've never had an issue playing at home.  At highest settings.

[viper37]

An interesting argument I heard the other day about why AI is just a fad came onto Google Stadia- that cloud gaming is completely backwards thinking. Computers are cheap and plentiful. Its reliable ultra fast internet that is a rare commodity in the world. For most people it will never make more sense to play a game on a computer hundreds of miles away rather than just hooking one up to your TV.

Thoughts?

Chromebooks and low spec computers are cheap and plentiful, high spec computers are big and expensive or less big and really expensive.  The AAA gaming ecosystem is built around high-cost hardware and planned hardware obsolescence, a nasty combination.  Cloud gaming can liberate the user from the GPU upgrade treadmill, but even more importantly, it liberates the user from dedicated hardware, period.  You can play on any device (screen) you want in virtually any form factor.

Yes fast and reliable internet connections aren't available everywhere in the world, but where they are available it makes that service attractive. And the value and use cases of building out network infrastructure go well beyond gaming so investment will continue to pour in.

Cloud gaming has too much latency for most games to be played reliably on ultra high graphics, it requires lowering graphic quality.

I use GeForce now and I've never had an issue playing at home.  At highest settings.

You are in New York City.  Not living in a rural road on the countryside with shitty upload speed and limited download speed.  max I can get is 200/50 and I have to buy a business internet subscription for that.  Otherwise, I'd have 100/30 with throttling.  And they tell me they have no plans to upgrade anytime soon.

[The Minsky Moment]

You are in New York City.  Not living in a rural road on the countryside with shitty upload speed and limited download speed.  max I can get is 200/50 and I have to buy a business internet subscription for that.  Otherwise, I'd have 100/30 with throttling.  And they tell me they have no plans to upgrade anytime soon.

Yeah that would definitely be an issue for cloud gaming.  Here bandwidth is plentiful but space is at a premium. So cloud gaming >> big gaming rig.

[viper37]

You are in New York City.  Not living in a rural road on the countryside with shitty upload speed and limited download speed.  max I can get is 200/50 and I have to buy a business internet subscription for that.  Otherwise, I'd have 100/30 with throttling.  And they tell me they have no plans to upgrade anytime soon.

Yeah that would definitely be an issue for cloud gaming.  Here bandwidth is plentiful but space is at a premium. So cloud gaming >> big gaming rig.

Yeah. I can see the appeal for city centre.

But my cousin is in Montreal, not too far off the city center, and he can't get fiber.

I see the need for both high upload and download speed when using cloud gaming as nothing is local.  Cable internet can have decent download speed, but you are often stuck at low (<50mbps) download speed, and that is still a vast majority of the occidental world.  Not to mention other remote parts that get their internet with satellites.