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Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. A few examples: - Recently had to purchase new servers, because of signed contracts the only servers we were

Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. A few examples: - Recently had to purchase new servers, because of signed contracts the only servers we were allowed to purchase and put in the datacenter were four years old and technically EOF. - Firewall changes, AD changes, provisioning a VM, etc. are 48 hour turnaround. Purchasing new hardware requires 4-6 weeks. - Had an intermittent issue with their edge firewall, it'd slow certain connections to a crawl and eventually they'd timeout. Took six months to fix it, for the first three months they told us it wasn't their fault (turning off their deep packet inspection ended up fixing it). I still remember when we opened the first ticket about it, and the reply was "no other customers are experiencing problems" and it was closed. That's just a few examples of how painful it can be. To give you the other side of the coin, having worked with an enterprise contract in AWS, we were having an intermittent issue with DNS resolving failing for a few seconds every few days. They put an engineer on it full time till they found the problem (we misconfigured it), and it didn't cost us anything more than the enterprise support. I was actually shocked they'd invest that much on such a vague issue. Yes AWS is expensive, but you're getting world class engineering proven at scale, and access to some very smart/motivated people to support it (and they have access to the teams who built it, when they can't solve it). I don't think I'd ever choose managed datacenter over AWS/GCP/Azure/etc. Either do it in-house where there's accountability, or use cloud providers who have proven they're competency. To be clear, I'm talking about VPC/EC2/etc. I can't really discuss a lot of their higher level and newer managed services; they either weren't as good, or I haven't tried them. But the bedrock these clouds are built on is solid, and that's worth paying good money for.

vonmoltke 8y ago
> Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. > I don't think I'd ever choose managed datacenter over AWS/GCP/Azure/etc. Who mentioned managed datacenters? I'm pretty sure people are talking about leasing space and doing everything else in-house.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I've done that too. It's obviously easier than running an entire datacenter, but you still need to manage all the underlying services that you deliver to your development team. For example, running things like this on your own: - storage clusters - database clusters - compute clusters They are often very easy to setup, but when things go wrong, they go very wrong. And welcome to a stressful environment because if you can't figure it out and your people can't, well, your business just sits and burns while you do. Even when AWS has a system-wide outage, it's nice to know that I don't have to be dealing with those underlying problems anymore and I know they have the best people working on them. I cannot put into words, after operating MySQL clusters on my own and playing back transactions after failures, how nice it is to use AWS RDS and how it's just been zero problems. Zero. I sleep through automatic updates of our database system with RDS. I would have never done that on our own system. And in most places, even "managed" leased hardware, you still will need to purchase/lease and run your own hardware firewalls and ddos mitigation. The datacenter might offer that protection "built-in" but you'll soon find the limitations of that offering when you face a substantial attack.
llama052 8y ago
This honestly sounds like a company specific problem more than a datacenter issue.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  No. That is my experience too. If your company’s core value prop isn’t running and managing a datacenter, your datacenter is gonna suck when compared to folks who do it for a living.
bm1362 8y ago
Having worked in the EC2 org, the people doing the customer service tickets were usually the oncall, when nothing was on fire, or the daytime SREs. You could get hit-or-miss depending on whom is oncall and picks up your ticket, some people were non-empathic and would reply to those tickets with one word answers or you'd get lucky with people that would dig deep.
jordanbeiber 8y ago
Seems like your experience is a case of ”ad hoc” systems management and I know what you’re saying is all to common in the enterprise world though. Having spent my entire working life automating infrastructure of all kinds I know you can achieve an enourmous increase in efficency rather easiliy with a few well placed automated processes. I’ve always been baffled by the fact that at any given larger company there are 100’s of employees trying to supply the business with tools to automate business processes — the IT dept. Yet, they are completely incapable of using these very same tools to automate their own ”business”. And the resistance I’ve been met with at different places through the years when trying to implement the simplest of automation is massive. I used to laugh at the ”cloud” bacause, back then, at 25 years of age, sitting at a medium size company with boatloads of cash, I assumed everyone was doing it the way we were; automating all the things. Now, many years later I’v obviously realized that many places simply does not have the right culture and mindset as it’s not “core business”. I believe however that this is changing, and changing quickly. In many ways thanks to the “cloud”.

vonmoltke 8y ago

> Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. > I don't think I'd ever choose managed datacenter over AWS/GCP/Azure/etc. Who mentioned managed datacenters? I'm pretty sure people are talking about leasing space and doing everything else in-house.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I've done that too. It's obviously easier than running an entire datacenter, but you still need to manage all the underlying services that you deliver to your development team. For example, running things like this on your own: - storage clusters - database clusters - compute clusters They are often very easy to setup, but when things go wrong, they go very wrong. And welcome to a stressful environment because if you can't figure it out and your people can't, well, your business just sits and burns while you do. Even when AWS has a system-wide outage, it's nice to know that I don't have to be dealing with those underlying problems anymore and I know they have the best people working on them. I cannot put into words, after operating MySQL clusters on my own and playing back transactions after failures, how nice it is to use AWS RDS and how it's just been zero problems. Zero. I sleep through automatic updates of our database system with RDS. I would have never done that on our own system. And in most places, even "managed" leased hardware, you still will need to purchase/lease and run your own hardware firewalls and ddos mitigation. The datacenter might offer that protection "built-in" but you'll soon find the limitations of that offering when you face a substantial attack.

llama052 8y ago

This honestly sounds like a company specific problem more than a datacenter issue.

spookthesunset 8y ago
No. That is my experience too. If your company’s core value prop isn’t running and managing a datacenter, your datacenter is gonna suck when compared to folks who do it for a living.

bm1362 8y ago

Having worked in the EC2 org, the people doing the customer service tickets were usually the oncall, when nothing was on fire, or the daytime SREs. You could get hit-or-miss depending on whom is oncall and picks up your ticket, some people were non-empathic and would reply to those tickets with one word answers or you'd get lucky with people that would dig deep.

jordanbeiber 8y ago

Seems like your experience is a case of ”ad hoc” systems management and I know what you’re saying is all to common in the enterprise world though. Having spent my entire working life automating infrastructure of all kinds I know you can achieve an enourmous increase in efficency rather easiliy with a few well placed automated processes. I’ve always been baffled by the fact that at any given larger company there are 100’s of employees trying to supply the business with tools to automate business processes — the IT dept. Yet, they are completely incapable of using these very same tools to automate their own ”business”. And the resistance I’ve been met with at different places through the years when trying to implement the simplest of automation is massive. I used to laugh at the ”cloud” bacause, back then, at 25 years of age, sitting at a medium size company with boatloads of cash, I assumed everyone was doing it the way we were; automating all the things. Now, many years later I’v obviously realized that many places simply does not have the right culture and mindset as it’s not “core business”. I believe however that this is changing, and changing quickly. In many ways thanks to the “cloud”.