SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I've had some occasions of late to peer through the looking glass into a world that I hadn't seen much of previously. Specifically, I'm talking about the world of so-called "cloud" stuff, where you basically pay someone else to build and run stuff for you, instead of doing it yourself.
I'll skip the analysis of build vs. buy and just jump straight to the point where you've chosen "buy". Then you've had a whole bunch of fun outages caused by something going wrong with their services. Finally, you reach the point of a sit-down talk with the vendor to figure things out. Maybe they send some sales people too, or perhaps it's just engineers. You talk for a while, and before long, you realize what happened.
[...] This becomes obvious when talking about some problem you experienced at the hands of their system. The whole time, their dashboard stayed green because from their point of view, they had tremendous availability. We're talking 99.999% here! Totally legit!
Meanwhile, you were having a really bad day. Nothing was working. Your business was in shambles. Your customers were at your throat yelling for action, and all you could do is point at the vendor. What happened?
Well, this is the point where you find out that their "99.999%" availability is for their entire system. They see that, and they're good. It's not a problem! Everything is fine.
This also completely misses the fact that for you, everything was failing. It doesn't matter though, since your worst day still won't move the needle on their fail-o-meter. They won't see you. They won't have any idea anything even happened until you complain weeks later. You are the bug on the windscreen of the locomotive. The train has no idea you were ever there.
The problem is that they weren't monitoring from the customer's perspective. Had they done that, it would have been clear that oodles of requests from some subset of customers were failing. They would have also realized that certain customers had all of their requests failing. For those customers, there were no nines to be had that day.
Seriously, if you have a multi-tenant system, you owe it to your customers to monitor it from their point of view. Otherwise, how can you possibly know when you've done something that'll leave them in the cold?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @07:00AM (9 children)
You say that central service providers should monitor from customers' point of view.
How does one do this? Do we position a piece of equipment at each customer's site? That flies in the face of the whole "you can run your corporation from a coffee shop with your cellphone" philosophy. It opens up a can of worms we thought we'd gotten rid of - insurance, power, security, maintenance, inventory, employees. We're trying to get rid of all that!
Let's look at it from the service provider's view. They have a monitoring system and someone to watch it. They know what their infrastructure depends upon (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell) [wikipedia.org] and have remediation procedures in place - that's how they achieve and maintain 99.9999% uptime.
Do you? Have a monitoring system? Or anyone to watch it?
Or did you terminate all of YOUR employees, who understood YOUR dependencies, and depend upon the [verbal] [mis]representations of salespeople, when they told you it was OK, just put it into the cloud?
I guess it's time to sit down and do the math.
How much did you spend on your cloud-based renter infrastructure?
How much did you save by outsourcing everything, including responsibility for YOUR infrastructure, to total strangers?
How much business did you lose as a result of your downtime?
Is relocating your business logic and confidential data offsite to a location and resources that you do not have control over or responsibility for, cost effective ... or not?
It's a business decision, right? It shouldn't be that hard.
We KNOW your IT people told you this.
We KNOW you lie to yourselves and each other that you didn't know.
All you had to do was draw a few cartoon-grade diagrams on a whiteboard to see the potential for network latency.
We KNOW that you accepted the bonuses of the people you terminated as your due.
We KNOW you're going to duck and weave and blame the same cloud company that we KNOW you selected.
We KNOW you have been through three or four or five cloud vendors now and so your infrastructure is spread through three or four or five different cloud vendors' infrastructures.
We KNOW you are having a hard time finding people who know three or four or five different cloud vendor infrastructure GUIs and command line interfaces, never mind one, especially as you haven't spent a penny on educating employees since 2002.
We KNOW that you have trouble retaining even temporary employees and that you abuse them for not being able to administer the infrastructures that YOU relocated to vague and amorphous locations that you, yourself, do not even know, using vendors that YOU selected.
We KNOW you will never let got of control of YOUR infrastructure until you die.
We KNOW you will hold us responsible for everything that goes wrong and take credit for everything that goes right, until the day you die.
Smart people are waiting for you all to die - or be fired - whichever comes first.
Dumb people are studying for their AWS certificates, in a never-ending rat race of fees and evolving GUIs.
I see night shift employees for the San Francisco Municipal Railway whose job is cleaning dirty buses getting paid better and having better work conditions and better job security than your average crack UNIX systems administrator.
Why would I bother to learn AWS?
If it's so easy, go teach yourself AWS and administer your OWN infrastructure, motherfuckers!
~childo
... 35 years continuous industrial-grade experience and going on 4 years of unemployment.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @07:20AM (2 children)
For average people it is clearly visible if a bus is clean or not, but fairly invisible if a cloud infrastructure is clean or not. It is a barrier of reality perception, what makes the difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:04PM (1 child)
And the only way to make things real to the gaslighting assholes of the world is to organize. What can't IT people do for the life of them? Organize.
They're armchair political theorists who mistake mytho-macho bullshit for political theory.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:42PM
A lot of IT people go into IT because they prefer dealing with computers than dealing with people. It's difficult to get large numbers of people-adverse folks to organize with their fellow people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:32AM (2 children)
Yes, that's how people know that they are not getting the 99.999% that they were told they could expect. Once again, marketing makes claims that are not experienced by the users. I don't care how efficiently the cloud provider thinks they are performing if I am getting a service that is unable to sustain my business.
You sound a bit hurt....
... and that explains why. But your experiences do not reflect how every company treats its employees. If a customer is paying for a service then they are entitled to expect to receive that service.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:50PM
The rise of cloud services is an example of how the market for tech people is moving towards narrower fields of tool (in the software sense) based expertise, and thus greater fragmentation. In software, I imagine that some of this fragmentation is artificial because it helps lock in customers. Generally, as technology moves forward, more specialization emerges. This has been going on at least since the scientific revolution, so maybe it’s inevitable. If you want to go into STEM, expect to become a specialist, and hope that what you picked will be in demand for years to come. If you go into management, it’s not as big a worry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @10:08PM
A company I contracted for had a fool proof monitoring system in place. They’d wait for customers to complain it wasn’t working. Worked perfectly.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:39PM
Man, who pissed in your cornflakes?
Look, there are situations where the cloud is a stupid solution. And there are also situations where it is an incredible solution. The trick is to know the difference.
As for system administrators being mistreated: there are companies, and then there are companies. Let me digress...
When I'm consulting (which I do a fair amount of, mostly for SMEs that are too small to have their own IT staff), one of the things I look for is the visibility of whoever is taking care of their computing infrastructure. If whoever they've hired is really visible, always out there fixing stuff, that's actually a horrible sign. It means that stuff is always breaking, users are poorly trained, etc... If everything "just works", and most people aren't sure who to call if they have a problem, that's generally a great sign.
So: If you have a company where the sys-admin is good enough to keep everything running, almost invisibly - and if this sys-admin is being mistreated - then the sys-admin needs to move on to a decent company. Alternatively, there are sys-admins who feel terribly put-upon, because they are simply incompetent. Their infrastructure is always failing. People are always disturbing their peaceful game of minesweeper, because of yet-another-outage. From the tone of AC's rant, well, I think the latter scenario is the more fitting...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:43PM
fuck these suited whores funding the enemies of humanity every chance they get. they could have paid some small company and they would have worked their asses off. instead these dumb, lazy whores just choose whoever is biggest and most closed. they deserve what they get.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @02:34AM
You should do what I did after long-term unemployment. Get a job that has the simple job description: "Do as you're told". *Cracks knuckles*