3 ms·

My bullshit detector is going off so loudly, I think I best go lie down. At my last company, we paid for a Zeus ZXTM license (which was an excellent product an

by slyphon 14y ago

My bullshit detector is going off so loudly, I think I best go lie down. At my last company, we paid for a Zeus ZXTM license (which was an excellent product and very expensive for our little startup), and they didn't approach the level of arrogance here. The varnish guy is kind of opinionated, but he's got the chops to back it up, and you can, y'know, look at the source. An obvious benefit of open source is also that if I take a large risk of running my business on your oddball web server and you get hit by a bus, I'm pretty much hosed. I'd rather buy 4 additional servers and run nginx than take that risk. Or, y'know, use a CDN. Whatever, if the developers really are THAT much more skilled and their product is so far and away better than every other solution out there, then they should really hire someone who knows how to do marketing and PR properly, because they're not doing themselves any favors.

reinhardt 14y ago
Off-topic, but I'm curious why you paid for Zeus instead of any other battle-tested FOSS alternative.
- slyphon 14y ago
  We needed load balancers and at the time, the choices were ZXTM, ServerIron (which I'd used subsequently, and am very grateful we didn't pick) or F5. We'd had a truly terrible experience with an F5 reseller so we decided to meet with the Zeus guys. One really attractive option at the time was that they would provide us a solaris build of their software (we were a Solaris 10 shop), and we could run it on our own hardware, which was much better provisioned than the comparable F5 hardware at the time. All of that aside, the motivation was that by using a product, instead of rolling our own solution, would be more maintainable, and we'd have a support contract. Compared with the mod_rewrite mess we had, ZXTM was a huge improvement. Plus we got stats, graphs, IP failover that worked flawlessly, active/active configuration sync, and a webui that made it so people who weren't intimately familiar with the config syntax of a variety of disparate services could perform fairly complex tasks (like A-B builds). I mean, we also paid for Cisco ASA 5550s as a firewall/VPN solution for many of the same reasons. It all came down to what we wanted to spend our time engineering and what we could get management to spend money on. :)
1SaltwaterC 14y ago
I like the way Zeus deals with their performance claims: you can test it, but you can not disclose the results. The same crap as Microsoft used to do. Although I did sign up for a trial, I didn't bother going further after reading the EULA. Long story short: nginx is powering our servers right now, without any need for changing the platform.
- slyphon 14y ago
  Hah, I didn't know that about the performance publishing. We used nginx for static content and as an fcgi front-end.

by slyphon 14y ago

reinhardt 14y ago

Off-topic, but I'm curious why you paid for Zeus instead of any other battle-tested FOSS alternative.

slyphon 14y ago
We needed load balancers and at the time, the choices were ZXTM, ServerIron (which I'd used subsequently, and am very grateful we didn't pick) or F5. We'd had a truly terrible experience with an F5 reseller so we decided to meet with the Zeus guys. One really attractive option at the time was that they would provide us a solaris build of their software (we were a Solaris 10 shop), and we could run it on our own hardware, which was much better provisioned than the comparable F5 hardware at the time. All of that aside, the motivation was that by using a product, instead of rolling our own solution, would be more maintainable, and we'd have a support contract. Compared with the mod_rewrite mess we had, ZXTM was a huge improvement. Plus we got stats, graphs, IP failover that worked flawlessly, active/active configuration sync, and a webui that made it so people who weren't intimately familiar with the config syntax of a variety of disparate services could perform fairly complex tasks (like A-B builds). I mean, we also paid for Cisco ASA 5550s as a firewall/VPN solution for many of the same reasons. It all came down to what we wanted to spend our time engineering and what we could get management to spend money on. :)

1SaltwaterC 14y ago

I like the way Zeus deals with their performance claims: you can test it, but you can not disclose the results. The same crap as Microsoft used to do. Although I did sign up for a trial, I didn't bother going further after reading the EULA. Long story short: nginx is powering our servers right now, without any need for changing the platform.

slyphon 14y ago
Hah, I didn't know that about the performance publishing. We used nginx for static content and as an fcgi front-end.