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1. Will Dell servers magically appear in your racks all mounted correctly? Shipping delays is a very serious and real problem. 2. Will Dell servers arrived wit

by didip 9y ago

1. Will Dell servers magically appear in your racks all mounted correctly? Shipping delays is a very serious and real problem. 2. Will Dell servers arrived with 0 problems on its components? Any time I ordered meaningful amount of servers, I usually get about 5% fail rate. VMs aren't perfect but you can destroy and recreate in different region almost real time. 3. Ever had to deal with difficult-to-work-with network admin? The cloud is significantly less pain in the ass.

MBCook 9y ago
#3 is why we went to Amazon, and its one of the reasons we were successful. Sad as that was. No weeks/months of delays/hassles/fights/sabotage. Just success as fast as we could do our part and figure out the few small hurdles.
- _jal 9y ago
  ...That sounds more like an HR problem than a technical problem. There are network engineers in the world who don't live in caves and gnaw at the bones of administrative assistants.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Oh it was, but it was the situation we had to operate in. And Amazon allowed to to achieve amazing things that never would have been possible and that's without the idea of things like Kinesis or Redshift that we couldn't have achieved easily/at all even without personnel problems. You simply could never get 3 new servers or drastically respec an existing one in under a day let alone minutes. We were a small shop so it's not like we had spare servers ready to go.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    There are, but they are hard to find. Networking is a great place for assholes to build empires and exert control. In 20 years of professional engagement with distributed and data center networks, most of these guys (and they are almost always guys) running network orgs are an impediment and spend more time helping out their vendor of choice than anything else. I've run into awesome network guys in position of power only a few times, and they are 100x employees. The last major rollout of a service that I did was literally 3 months ahead of schedule solely because of the efforts of this awesome network dude snowman as recently put in charge.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      We saw some good people, but they generally left because they didn't want to work in that environment. Eventually replaced with someone helpful, it was amazing what we started to get done. Got lucky there we found the replacement and he stayed long enough to be there when needed.
    - mooreds 9y ago
      I wonder if all these 10x network admins are now working at gcp/AWS/Azure.
  - late2part 9y ago
    Please send me their resumes..
- rdtsc 9y ago
  Is sabotage something you are worried about in general. Just seems like there might be deeper and serious issues if that is a primary concern.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    It was sabotage in the 'oops this project isn't working' or 'oops this really import thing came up, no time' or 'didn't I do that?' sense. Having some plausible deniability. Work slowdown/stoppage stuff. Not actively breaking things (mostly). And it was all directed at maintaining control/power. Worst person I've ever worked with. When I tell stories at future jobs I fully expect people to not believe me. Hell, people who weren't there for earlier incidents often didn't believer them.
    - rdtsc 9y ago
      Oh I believe you. I've heard of it before. Was trying to say that if that's an issue, it should be an HR fix more than an infrastructure fix. But I also imagine often that person also convinced management the are an "11x rockstar programmer"...
      - MBCook 9y ago
        They were one of the hardest working people in the company. Partially that's because they worked on nonsense projects they made up, and partially that's because they were always putting out fires caused by the fact they did things poorly in the first place.
        rdtsc 9y ago
        That's scares me cause I've seen that bit way too many times. There are huddled over the terminal in the evening as all managers leave "Oh look so and so is working so hard" and I am thinking "they are fixing the bug they put in just last week because they didn't bother testing it enough".
        9y ago
jcastro 9y ago
A corollary to #1, oops, mistakes were made, these server specs are wrong, I actually need more/less CPU/RAM/storage.

by didip 9y ago

MBCook 9y ago

#3 is why we went to Amazon, and its one of the reasons we were successful. Sad as that was. No weeks/months of delays/hassles/fights/sabotage. Just success as fast as we could do our part and figure out the few small hurdles.

_jal 9y ago
...That sounds more like an HR problem than a technical problem. There are network engineers in the world who don't live in caves and gnaw at the bones of administrative assistants.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Oh it was, but it was the situation we had to operate in. And Amazon allowed to to achieve amazing things that never would have been possible and that's without the idea of things like Kinesis or Redshift that we couldn't have achieved easily/at all even without personnel problems. You simply could never get 3 new servers or drastically respec an existing one in under a day let alone minutes. We were a small shop so it's not like we had spare servers ready to go.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  There are, but they are hard to find. Networking is a great place for assholes to build empires and exert control. In 20 years of professional engagement with distributed and data center networks, most of these guys (and they are almost always guys) running network orgs are an impediment and spend more time helping out their vendor of choice than anything else. I've run into awesome network guys in position of power only a few times, and they are 100x employees. The last major rollout of a service that I did was literally 3 months ahead of schedule solely because of the efforts of this awesome network dude snowman as recently put in charge.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    We saw some good people, but they generally left because they didn't want to work in that environment. Eventually replaced with someone helpful, it was amazing what we started to get done. Got lucky there we found the replacement and he stayed long enough to be there when needed.
  - mooreds 9y ago
    I wonder if all these 10x network admins are now working at gcp/AWS/Azure.
- late2part 9y ago
  Please send me their resumes..
rdtsc 9y ago
Is sabotage something you are worried about in general. Just seems like there might be deeper and serious issues if that is a primary concern.
- MBCook 9y ago
  It was sabotage in the 'oops this project isn't working' or 'oops this really import thing came up, no time' or 'didn't I do that?' sense. Having some plausible deniability. Work slowdown/stoppage stuff. Not actively breaking things (mostly). And it was all directed at maintaining control/power. Worst person I've ever worked with. When I tell stories at future jobs I fully expect people to not believe me. Hell, people who weren't there for earlier incidents often didn't believer them.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    Oh I believe you. I've heard of it before. Was trying to say that if that's an issue, it should be an HR fix more than an infrastructure fix. But I also imagine often that person also convinced management the are an "11x rockstar programmer"...
    - MBCook 9y ago
      They were one of the hardest working people in the company. Partially that's because they worked on nonsense projects they made up, and partially that's because they were always putting out fires caused by the fact they did things poorly in the first place.
      - rdtsc 9y ago
        That's scares me cause I've seen that bit way too many times. There are huddled over the terminal in the evening as all managers leave "Oh look so and so is working so hard" and I am thinking "they are fixing the bug they put in just last week because they didn't bother testing it enough".
        9y ago

jcastro 9y ago

A corollary to #1, oops, mistakes were made, these server specs are wrong, I actually need more/less CPU/RAM/storage.