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What was the reason behind the move to Google?
by rsolva 3y ago
What was the reason behind the move to Google?
- jsiepkes 3y agoI assume you mean from on-prem OX to Google Workspace? Maintaining OX is not super much work but it is a complex piece of software. You'll have a lot of moving parts; Open-Xchange (OSGi / Jetty application), MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, etc. All these parts need monitoring, disaster recovery, high availabilty setup in some cases, etc. The "absolute amount of time" these things cost isn't even super much. Especially if you are already pretty proficient in the technologies. But, personally, the hardest part of maintaining a bunch of these opensource solutions on-prem is that you are people's "go to person" for it. Meaning everything what happens to it is "your problem". For example if people perceive the solution as slow, you will need to deep dive in it. If Google Workspace is slow it's a Google problem. Maintaining these solutions (at the time we also used Zulip on-prem, Asterisk and some other stuff) becomes a recurring distraction. Patching, investigating stuff like a failed backup, breaking updates, testing updates, user complaints, etc. So for us (about 60 people at the time) it simply wasn't worth the effort anymore anno 2018 to self-host it if you could offload it for 15 Euro a month to Google. But when we started out in 2005, it was. Also keep in mind that in my role as software developer the on-prem stuff was a "secondary objective".
- rsolva 3y agoThanks for the explanation. I think a common mistake is to not make the maintenance a part of someone's job description and actually pay them for this type of work. If keeping things running feels like a secondary objective, a distraction, it's quite hard to stay on top of things and be proactive, not reactive.