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posted by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-have-felt-this-pain dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:32AM (2 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:32AM (#869585) Journal

    Do you? Have a monitoring system? Or anyone to watch it?

    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.

    If it's so easy, go teach yourself AWS and administer your OWN infrastructure, motherfuckers!

    You sound a bit hurt....

    ... 35 years continuous industrial-grade experience and going on 4 years of unemployment.

    ... 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.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:50PM

    by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:50PM (#869618) Journal

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @10:08PM (#869743)

    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.