Microsoft to move out of the education market?

[DavePa]

My annoyance is that my renewal date is July 31, so the best I can do is renew for three years on July 31 2017 and keep my discount until July 2020, 11 months less than the optimum.

 

Snap

[pcstru]

I do agree with that in principle, but the reason I say both on this occasion is that I don't think it's a good idea to move to the cloud if you find that it is indeed cheaper (which it will be for some) but doesn't actually add to what you can already do. It's a big change and I would personally say you should be moving to the cloud because it offers you functionality you don't already have, and if it can save you money too then obviously that's great. But I wouldn't move to the cloud just because it was cheaper (unless it was massively so) because of the other risks and disadvantages it can bring, which are sidelined too often.

It depends on the priorities of the business. Sometimes saving money is an absolute essential because if you don't, you simply won't be in business tomorrow. I'm sure some will say that that is an unlikely situation in schools but having just had my budget reduced by a nice round £200K, I'll even look at reducing functionality if it saves money and we can live within whatever functional constraints remain. Personally, I don't think personal preference should come into it. Impacts on cost and functionality should be understood, risks identified, quantified and managed; all of which should lead to decision makers making informed decisions.

[Ephelyon]

True - I guess I'm talking about what George Osborne might call 'normal times'...

[smithson83]

It depends on the priorities of the business. Sometimes saving money is an absolute essential because if you don't, you simply won't be in business tomorrow. I'm sure some will say that that is an unlikely situation in schools but having just had my budget reduced by a nice round £200K, I'll even look at reducing functionality if it saves money and we can live within whatever functional constraints remain. Personally, I don't think personal preference should come into it. Impacts on cost and functionality should be understood, risks identified, quantified and managed; all of which should lead to decision makers making informed decisions.

 

£200k ...?

[nathan]

Microsoft to introduce new 'Windows 10 Pro for Education' SKU - MSPoweruser

 

Hate the site, but it's interesting that there are some news sku's including education pro, pro workstation, enterprise subscription. That last one looks interesting.

[gshaw]

Microsoft to introduce new 'Windows 10 Pro for Education' SKU - MSPoweruser

 

Hate the site, but it's interesting that there are some news sku's including education pro, pro workstation, enterprise subscription. That last one looks interesting.

 

Hmmm interesting. Given that current 10 Education is Enterprise with a different badge on I wonder if 10 Pro for Education will be a lower spec version for the new cloud transition agreements...

[pcstru]

£200k ...?

We are a substantial size, have an odd set-up and the last few years has seen sustained investment in new IT as well as refreshing existing stock. The budget covers a lot of stuff.

[nicholab]

I a bit hacked off looks like I might miss out on any cool virtulisation. Due to all this cloud stuff. Every time I got close to virtulisation someone has said no! I have been a virtulisation believer for 10 years.

[CyberNerd]

There will always be other advantages. Some companies move to the cloud because disaster recovery plans, others because the security is better than it is in house.

 

or not for some customers

Economy of mechanism – The road to hell is paved with SAML Assertions

7hr fix is quite impressive

[zag]

I a bit hacked off looks like I might miss out on any cool virtulisation. Due to all this cloud stuff. Every time I got close to virtulisation someone has said no! I have been a virtulisation believer for 10 years.

 

You can host virtualized servers in the cloud, thats basically the next step for us who've been using VM's for a while now.

[nicholab]

But you miss out on deploying the hardware and SAN stuff.

[CyberNerd]

But you miss out on deploying the hardware and SAN stuff.

 

that's an advantage. Why would you want to if you can avoid it?

[Ephelyon]

... because that's the fun stuff? Seriously, if the nitty-gritty side of being a sysadmin is something you would want to "avoid", why did you go into it? Or did you not go into it directly?

 

(This is more of a mini "opinion piece" and not intended to be a judgment per se. I'm asking these questions as much out of genuine curiosity as anything else.)

 

For me, designing an infrastructure (more on the systems side than networks), setting up a server backup/failover scheme, planning/installing/configuring/maintaining the back-end server fleet, deploying and managing the system as a whole... that, that is why I went into IT system administration. I enjoy it and I have my main skillset in it. Why on earth would I want to just outsource all of that to someone else?!

 

Of course it's not true to say that there's nothing left for a sysadmin to be doing if everything is cloud-based, but I do think it rather takes the "heart and soul" out of the job. I would struggle to believe I'm the only person who thinks this way too... :/

[nicholab]

You hit the nail on the head there. If your more of a software type I think that you feel less bothered with that life and soul. Not sure I massively keen on just being a software jock. Edited April 30, 2016 by nicholab

[Ephelyon]

Well, I'd say there's room for all of us by all means, but it isn't right for one group to be effectively shown the door if there's no real need for that. If the cloud offers you benefits, then fine, but there are many setups where that's not necessarily the case and the nub of my argument is that, if you've managed your infrastructure strategically over the past few years, you really shouldn't need the cloud (by which I mean a fully cloud-based VM setup, not just lashings of O365 or GApps). Just to be clear, that's not meant to be a sly dig at anyone's competence - it also depends on whether your SLT have actually allowed you to do that properly!

 

I think there's a good analogy to be drawn with all this "enforced academisation" stuff going around at the moment. Put bluntly, it's not hard to tell the difference between ideology and dogma, and I think in both "cloud first" and "academies everywhere", we're seeing a policy being dogmatically enforced without any real consideration of whether it's genuinely better for all those affected. A multitude of alternative setups is good; enforcement of any one in particular is bad.

 

But that's perhaps for another thread...

Edited April 30, 2016 by Ephelyon

[CyberNerd]

... because that's the fun stuff? Seriously, if the nitty-gritty side of being a sysadmin is something you would want to "avoid", why did you go into it? Or did you not go into it directly?

 

my goal was to give students a better support and opportunities though IT.

Perhaps I'm a bit long in the tooth to be titting around with SAN these days - I have enough to do.

 

Back in the day I would spend ages messing around RAID configs and Hardware drivers. I would spend literally days setting up a server. Now I can build a thousand load balanced servers (given the budget) in a few minutes with a carefully crafted command line or two. I'm not saying the hardware side is a redundant skill and I still have a V3700 to babysit. lets just say i'm not in a hurry to learn FORTRAN either.

[nicholab]

Scaling servers in a cloud environment is great if that how you systems work. But that not how standard MS application work. Also we don't seem have cloud coverage for Solidworks. Edited April 30, 2016 by nicholab

[Ephelyon]

So... you don't find that any solution-oriented creativity ever stems from this "messing around" and "titting around"?

[CyberNerd]

Scaling servers in a cloud environment is great if that how you systems work. But that not how standard MS application work. Also we don't seem have cloud coverage for Solidworks.

 

The changing environment has been my point in this thread

 

So... you don't find that any solution-oriented creativity ever stems from this "messing around" and "titting around"?

 

Absolutely - loads! I think it mostly comes from the software side.

10 years ago we all jumped on the virtualisation bandwagon because it made provisioning and consolidating servers easier, saving time and money. With cloud IAAS you are just taking virtualisation to the next level because you no longer need to maintain the hardware. With PAAS you are taking IAAS to the next level because you no longer need to patch the servers.

 

I do still play with hardware: I spend the morning recompiling ffmpeg to offload h.265 encoding onto my graphics card; 10 fold speed increase which I couldn't have achieved on the cloud,

[nicholab]

It just a bit disappointing having never looked after virtual environment. It like I missed a massive part of IT. How do you become one of the people running the cloud? How do you end up doing meaningful job rather than a just using a fisher price cloud control panel?

[CyberNerd]

It just a bit disappointing having never looked after virtual environment. It like I missed a massive part of IT. How do you become one of the people running the cloud? How do you end up doing meaningful job rather than a just using a fisher price cloud control panel?

 

Sign up for a 60day free trial:

https://cloud.google.com/products/

[Ephelyon]

Perhaps viewing this as a software/hardware split is muddying the water a little...

 

It's true that in the pre-virtualisation era it was a case of saying "X server does Y job", so if I now have Z requirement, I need another server. I mean, yes, you could consolidate things that e.g. Microsoft would now call "roles" on a single instance - and Linux boxes have been veritable workhorses when it comes to this kind of thing - but you would still have your DC server, file server, print server, database server, web server, terminal server (if you were lucky) etc... and at some point you would probably also have your "unlucky workhorse" server that did all the other little things. And, yes, that could get expensive...

 

Repurposing those roles into "virtual instances" within your own infrastructure was revolutionary about a decade ago, yes. The idea that you didn't need "a box" to do "a thing" was new, and we had to deal with the idea that a few beefy boxes might replace e.g. a whole blade server cluster... but despite all of that, it was still your own infrastructure. You still designed it. You adjusted (kicking and screaming) to the new dynamic of how things would work... how you would plan for redundancy... how backups would be carried out... how you would distribute load... etc.

 

But I don't think that comparing a move to the cloud to virtualisation really works out. In the latter model, you had to decide how you would repurpose your infrastructure. In the former, you're handing that decision off to someone else. It's not the same thing at all.

[pcstru]

... because that's the fun stuff? Seriously, if the nitty-gritty side of being a sysadmin is something you would want to "avoid", why did you go into it? Or did you not go into it directly?

Todays 'cloud' is tomorrows nitty gritty. I was witness to the disruption the rise of the Personal Computer caused central IT who were providing mainframe/mini infrastructure. In many ways it was similar shift in IT - a transfer of power from a central provider to the user as people could do for themselves what they once needed to ask IT to do. Where once we installed a fat outlook client, now the vast outlook factories lie silent as people bypass us and take email on their phone or tablet. Anyhow, personally I came into IT way before todays nitty gritty was even a gleam in someones eye. I'm not even really a sysadmin, I'm one of those software typres. I just snuck in when no one was really looking. You won't tell, will you?

[Ephelyon]

I hear you - there have been step-changes all the way along the line. But in terms of this one, what we're looking at is not just a step-change in how we model our own infrastructure, but whether it even remains our own infrastructure. That takes things to a new level.

 

We've seen mainframe-based solutions where you had a central setup accessed by dumb terminals... then you had the introduction of "fat clients" that had to do complicated things like run their own OS that talks back to something else... then towards the back-end of the NT era Microsoft announced that they'd reinvented the mainframe concept with NT4 Terminal Server (and how we lolled at that)... then we decided to go for full-fat clients but with increased automation driven by the back-end (like GPO and more latterly GPP) to orchestrate many aspects of how they worked... and around the same time we started looking seriously at server virtualisation, which involved essentially the same setup but using fewer more beefy boxes to achieve mostly the same thing...

 

... and I see how it's easy to view the cloud as just the next logical progression on that journey. But, really, I don't think it is - there's something different about it. For all the changes that happened over the decades in respect of how you managed your environment, you still actually managed it - yourself. What the cloud means is that you don't do that; someone else does. There is a big difference between saying "we will adapt how we manage our environment" and saying "we will let someone else determine how our environment is managed"... oh, and it's not actually here either, it's somewhere else...

Edited April 30, 2016 by Ephelyon

[nicholab]

That it a bit like the cloud is the RM CC3/4 management console you can do things on the menu and it works fine but if you want to do something not in the menu your stuffed. It the idea of not operating the hardware that I miss. Edited April 30, 2016 by nicholab