Tag: essay

Too Much Oversight

People who follow me on twitter know my frustration with my day job. It’s not that I hate my job, it’s that I hate when the rules get in the way of things. Over the last three years, we’ve grown from a simple ‘do this please’ directive to a behemoth of monitoring and oversight.

Here’s an example. We run standard installs at 3pm once a week. Tickets must have a start time of 3pm and an end time of 5pm. Thank you auditing. If they don’t, they must have secondary approval to give us the okay to go at a ‘non standard time.’

Now, there is a sane reason for this. We do the install at 3pm, but from 1 to 2pm, we do server maintenance, and from 5 to 9 we do the databases. So really, 3 to 5pm on that one day makes sense, right? We don’t want to run over or the database guys get mad, and we don’t go early cause the server guys get mad. We’ve been doing this on the same day, except Thanksgiving or the random ‘on Thursday’ holiday, year in and out for over 30 years. Yes, 30. Some changes go at 10pm to 2am that night, but the 3pm run for this particular type of change is as normal as anything.

One day I get a ticket with the time ‘3:15pm to 5pm.’ You’d think I could just say ‘Sure, not a problem.’ It’s within the 3-5 time slot, and fifteen minutes is nothing. But no. No, I have to say “I’m sorry, but your ticket requires a start time of 3pm. We are not permitted to make exceptions on this.”

It burns at my very soul to have to tell people something this idiotic. I mean, it’s fifteen minutes and it would still run within the allotted time! Heck, the process this guy wanted takes 5 minutes total! But no, our tool locks things down to the point that I can neither start the process early nor can I accept a non-standard time without triggering alerts that, at the end of the month, slap me into the “Oversight Review Board” meeting, where I have to explain why I did it.

The problem is that the oversight machine gets in the way of our ability to be productive. This mechanism grew from the ‘old days’ when we would submit a request to make a change, and if I didn’t know that the server was being worked on from 1pm to 2pm, I’d just run the ticket whenever. The timeslots were general guidelines, not set in stone. Then we grew, and people realized they needed to coordinate a server change with a code push (my job) with a db upgrade and then with some other totally separate install. And since no one could possibly be expected to memorize every single moving part in the company, we have a new ticket system to manage it for us.

Old Way: I put in a ticket to make a change with the time/date I’d like it to happen and my boss approves it. The people making the change pick up the ticket and do the work.

New Way: I put in a ticket to make a change with the time/date I’d like it to happen and my boss approves it. If this change has any red-flags (like it’ll take more than 24 hours, or it affects XYZ), it goes to the Change Review Board, who looks at it and either approves it or asks me to come in and explain what I’m doing. Furthermore, if I go on certain dates, it goes to another level of review. If I want to do it in less than a week prep time, it gets extra review and my boss’s boss has to approve it.

Conceptually, this is meant to have enough eyes looking at a change that someone says “Wait! Bob, we can’t upgrade the DB severs that day! Joanne’s major install is that day!” However, nowhere in here is the system actually checking for us and saying ‘You’re going to be touching the following servers.’ Nowhere does a computer do the mind-numbingly boring work it’s great at and verify that all the interlocking pieces related to my change are also not changing, or if they are, it’s a related change.

We didn’t make the system work any better, we just became better at covering our asses. Now we know how to write a request with the right buzzwords. Like every request I make requires me to include what I’m changing, why I’m changing it, how I’ll test it, what documentation is there, who will be the ‘point’ person, what follow up we’ll do, and what unexpected problems might there be and how to we plan to fix them?

That last one makes me wince. I often write “We don’t expect any problems, but we’ll follow standard troubleshooting guidelines to fix them.” My boss tends to have to rewrite that for me, because my capacity for handling stupid questions is usually filled by the time I’ve completed the 10 questions on the form.

I know that the purpose of all this is to make sure that every change we make is one we needed to make, and that it’s done with the right amount of forethought and understanding. What it’s done was make everyone annoyed, and annoyed people don’t do work efficiently. Also it’s asking technical people to write explanations to non-techs, something a number of them aren’t good at and that’s okay! We can’t be expected to be Renaissance Geeks, good at all things.

Should the technical people be able to say ‘This change will make our ATMs faster’? Of course. And they do. But when they’re asked to detail out every single step, multiple times, in multiple ways, they get annoyed. Instead of asking the question once, they ask the ‘what are you doing?’ question 10 times, in 10 ways, to try and get you to answer what they want to know. And at the end of the day, they still don’t know.

Of course, the real reason for all this is so that when it goes wrong, the Bobs can point and go “Well, Joanne there screwed up.” and Joanne can point back and say “I said I was rebooting the ATMs at 4am, and you approved it.” and round and round it goes. I made a lot of friends once when I stepped into a M&M(M&M stands for “morbidity and mortality” and is a periodic conference in many medical centers usually held to review cases with poor or avoidable outcomes.) and announced “I can’t see why the system didn’t run as intended, so the logical reason for the outage was that I made a human error and clicked the wrong button.” Of course then they wanted me to code out human error and I decided they were idiots.

We went from pretty much no oversight past a rubber stamp, and relying on the little guy doing to work to raise any red flags, to massive amounts of oversight where we still rely heavily on the little guy doing the work to raise that red flag. The system locks us in, brokering no room for typos without having to restart the whole chain of events over again, so if you accidentally type in 3:01pm, and the little guy doesn’t notice, you both end up being asked why you did something ‘wrong’ on the metrics report at the end of the month.

Sometimes in my other posts I say that my perspective on the machinations of things like WordPress and Drupal oversight is different. This is why. I’ve seen the extremes on both ends, and I respect the need for both oversight and attentive management. I think that Open Source tends to handle it better because they can’t afford the big massive teams who have but one job, and that is to know everything. They know they can’t, so they know how to work together. They’re not afraid to email/IM/Skype each other for help, and if everything breaks, they can fix it and laugh about it over beer.

It’s not that they don’t ‘get it’, it’s that they do get it. Corporate America doesn’t.

5 December, 2011
Said It Once Before But It Bears Repeating
A lot of the time, we complain “Don’t people look in the forums before they ask a question?” Sometimes we kvetch that these people are ignorant or lazy, and many times they are. But while a lot of questions are repeated, it’s really not as cut and dried as it may seem.

We’ve all had conversations where it devolves into “Hey, can you get me that thing?” Usually this involves a hand gesture or two. I’m sure everyone’s been in the kitchen with family and pointed right at a cutting board and asked “Pass me that … that thing.” It’s not that you’re stupid, or ignorant, or lazy, it’s just that right now you forgot the word “cutting board” and as embarrassing as that is in the moment, we all accept that this happens to everyone.

What does this have to do with questions? It’s really a language thing, on many levels. If you ask six different people “What do you call those boxes on the admin dashboard of my CMS?” you’re going to get six different answers. (WordPress had this not too long ago, and it varies from ‘meta boxes’ to ‘widgets’ and everywhere in between.) Certainly we can attribute this to ‘different brains, different thought patterns.’ But also, if you’ve ever tried to learn a new language, you remember the brute memorization of words than you had to combine with actually using the words, otherwise you forgot them. It’s like that algebra you did in school. If you’re not using it, it’ll fall right out of your head. Unless it’s the lyrics to that song you hated.

Now that we all accept that we all forget, what’s the deal with not being able to find what we need? It comes back to naming. I often complain that looking for an image on Google would be easier if I could draw it. I’m a pretty visual person, and I like to see what it is that’s wrong. I ask people “Can you put up a screenshot of the error?” or What page are you on?” You get a lot of weird error reports in my life, like “When I upload a file I get an error.”

The problem is not that people don’t know how to explain what’s wrong. The problem is they don’t know the words to use.

Okay, maybe it’s a hair splitting, but when you say “I want my code to do THIS and instead it does THAT.” you will often see yourself using very non-technical terms. First and foremost, that’s okay. In fact, I encourage people to use the terms they’re familiar with, that will make it easier to get help. But you need to know what you’re asking for, and that’s a problem.

For example. You’re brand new to WordPress and you want to know how to upload an image. So you google “Upload image WordPress” and thankfully the very first hit is what you want. However, the more ‘specialized’ a question gets, the harder it is for the uninitiated to ask it. “I want to change those menu things on the side on my webpage” you think. Not a weird or uncommon request. Except ‘menu’ is the wrong word. You’re really asking “How do I edit my sidebar?” and that’s fairly easy.

You have to know what you’re asking for in order to get the right help, and you can’t know what it is until you ask someone who knows. And worse, you can’t know who to ask until you’re familiar with a product and it’s terminology.(Unless you know someone who speaks hand-gesture.) Basically when you’re learning a new program, you’re learning a new language. Worse, you’re learning a whole new culture. It’s like being back in college, where everything is hugely different from High School.

That’s why I try very hard not to get frustrated when I see the same question a million times. It’s rarely worded the exact same way. However, when I see people ask “How do I add images to WordPress?” I wonder if they’ve heard of searching.

The steps are easy:
1. Look it up on Google/Bing/whatever
2. Search the forums
3. Ask
When you hit step three, you have to ask it in the clearest language you can.

On my site, I have two ‘sections.’ There’s the main part where all my posts are, and there’s this list on the side that has calender, login links, and other stuff. Here’s what it looks like: .

Now you’ve asked a very clear question. Let’s compare it to the ones I saw recently:

My site has this stuff I don’t want. How do I remove it?

Which one would you answer?

It’s okay not to know what you’re asking about in detail. No one is born knowing, and you have to learn somehow. Accepting the fact that you’re new, or ignorant at something, is hard. We’re often told it’s not okay to not know things, that being ignorant is a sign of weakness. That’s just not true. We’re all ignorant and we’re all new about something. Everyone starts out ignorant. And we all start out not even knowing how to ask a question.(If you’ve ever been to a Passover dinner, the point of the Four Questions is to remind us that we all start out as the simple child who doesn’t know how to ask a question, and thus we tell a story every year to teach them, and ourselves.) The problem is that the answers you get depend entirely on how you ask the question! If you ask it wrong, you get the wrong answers, which frustrates everyone.

Should you search first and then ask? Of course. But you, as the helper, need to remember that the language barrier is going to cause a lot of the repetition. You’re going to get the same question, something basic and simple, asked a hundred times because people don’t know what they’re really asking. And yes, if there’s a good tutorial, toss them a link. But remember these people are new and scared and tossing them a link doesn’t help because they still may not speak the lingua fraca of the help docs!

Step back.

Remember what it was like to be new, and you’ll understand why the same questions are asked a hundred times over. Point them to the documentation. If the docs are lacking, fix that and make them better for the new guy. And, as hard as it is, especially right now in this holiday season, don’t get mad. Take a deep breath, watch Tron or play a round of World of Warcraft (or Mario Kart Wii) and remember that first time you did something, and how hard it was to learn all those terms and understand what they meant.

And you as the asker? You need to remember that sometimes, when the helpers ask you something that seems silly or weird, or overly simplistic, there’s a reason. We like to take apart a complicated question to its simplest iteration in order to understand what it is you want, and to be able to teach you “Okay, when you say ‘non blog index’ what you mean is a ‘static front page’ which is ….” We want you to learn our lingo so we know that we’re all speaking the same language. Otherwise we’re just doing a modern rendition of “Who’s On First.”
30 November, 2011
How Likely Is It That My Upgrade Will Fail?

My father, Woody, is a risk analyst. So I asked him, knowing my math skills, where should I start learning about how to analyse and assess risk. With the personal commentary removed, here’s his answer.

Math is not very important, at least not at the beginning. Risk assessment is really just thinking hard about answers to the 3 fundemental questions: what can go wrong; how likely is it; what are the consequences?

Look at what you do at work. How can good answers to the three questions mitigate the (bad) consequences of poor decisions?

Do a pilot study with an up-coming decision.

Remember that what can go wrong? means an analysis from a choice or intiating event (like a 3-day power black-out in Chicago) of the sequence of events and failures of systems to control the events, bad human decisions, etc. Each sequence ends up in a bad situation or an ok situation. How likely is it? is just the likelihood of that sequence occuring, usually measured by a probability for each event in the sequence, either through data or expert judgement. What are the consequences? means that for every bad ending of a sequence, what are the consequences of that bad state.

Make a decision-tree or event tree to enumerate the sequences. Each branching point (or top event) can have a fault tree to represent how that branch point fails or succeeds, or just expert judgement.

Represent the likelihood of failure as a number between 0 and 1 (then success will equal 1-failure).

Choose an end state for each sequence. Multiply the numbers for each branch point to get the likelihood of the sequence.

Add up all the sequence likelihoods for the same end-state.

That’s all there is to it.

When you put it that way, it does look pretty simple.

So I went through a proof of contcept process. This is my first time making a fault tree, and I didn’t bounce it off my father.

As you can see, this is pretty basic. What can go wrong? A lot actually, and I wasn’t really doing more than picking the common problems. But this is a fault tree, not a decision tree. Are they different? They are! A fault tree is basically what you use to suss out why things go wrong. A decision tree though, we make a list of decisions and spin out what the liklihood of a failure is. So my decision here is “How should I upgrade WP? Stable or Pre-Release?

Here you’ll see this is a similar enough, but wait! I have funny numbers! That’s my guesstimate at how likely these are to cause problems. See if you don’t have high tech skills, using SVN to upgrade is higher risk. In this world, you want a lower number. Like if you look at the stable release, you’d see that it adds up to a .4 failure, or a 1% that it’ll fail because of the upgrade tool or the user’s tech skills, but a higher 2% for ‘breaks’ (by which I mean you have a crappy plugin or theme).

Now I left off things like for SVN/Nightly/Beta/RC you get the cool toys early, mostly for space and since this is a poof of concept. It’s clear that SVN is something only experienced people should play with, but it’s very possible I’ve scored Beta/RC too high. They’re sort of a break-even point, though. While Stable will always be recommended, I did a quick revamp of Nightly and Beta/RC. Nightly’s are more risky because you run a risk of getting an incomplete build (that is, some of my bored maniac friends may be checking in code, and not be 100% done when you run your update – a common weird issue with SVN and why I always svn up before I consider reporting a bug). But a Beta/RC is a ‘very nearly done’ cake, just missing the icing.

Version two is, you can see, very similar. Personally I consider this a ‘start’ to understanding the risks inherent in a WordPress upgrade. If you held a gun on me and demanded I explain where I got the numbers, I would call them educated guesses, based on the forums, the mailing lists and my personal experience. Dad would say ‘Expert Judgement.’

My next steps are to read up more on the process of using decision trees, directly in relation with software. While I certainly will also be looking into how a tornado in downtown Chicago would impact my office (can I get to work? No? Okay, so VPN. Can it take 5,000 people at once? Based on Snowmageddon last year, no. etc etc and so on), understanding the logic trees behind the forms is always my first step.

To my WordPress friends, please let me know if I scored things too high or low in this one! To the rest of you, if you use these sorts of things in your jobs and, if so, how. I’d love to see some real-world applications outside the financial world!

16 November, 2011
‘it’s not my best work’ — not a surrender to mediocrity

Not My Best Work by Dan Epstein.

28 October, 2011
Community Driven Design

WordPress 3.3 is on the horizon, and already there’s a minor kerfluffle over the flyout menus. Regardless of if you agree with the change or not (I do, Otto does not, for example), it brings to mind the reality that every time there’s a new change to the Admin UI, someone demands to know ‘Who’ requested the change. One time, the answer was ‘Matt.’

While WP is open source, and that means it’s community driven, that’s only to a degree. Remember, at the end of the day the folks with commit access are the ones who decide what they want to support and have in their app. Theirs. WordPress isn’t a Democracy, it’s at best a parlimented monarchy, but really more of a benevolent dictatorship. This is neither good nor bad, when you put it in perspective, and I’m afraid that with products, especially free and/or open-source products, we as a user base consistently lack that perspective.

The company I work for recently switched to Office 2007. Yes, I want you all to take a moment to reflect on the fact that we didn’t move to Office 2007 until it was 2010 (and didn’t finish until summer 2011), it’s important. The reason we didn’t switch sooner wasn’t for anything technical. In fact, we really wanted to switch so we could upgrade SharePoint and have functional integration. No, there were no app conflicts or weird database issues preventing the upgrade. It ran on our operating systems without issues. But why didn’t we upgrade? Because some of the people in “very important positions” had trouble with it, and we were concerned that the UI change, which was rather dramatic, would overwhelm our help desk.

To put this in perspective even more, there are about 20k employees at my company (give or take, I’m not counting consultants here, or non-computer-using people). Of those, about an eighth are what I’d call techies. That is, maybe 2500 of us are really nerdy people who use foam swords or even know who Stallman is. Another 2500 of us are technically inclined, and capable of trouble shooting the basics. Another 2500 are smart enough to know how to explain their problem to the techs. That means over half the company are ‘real users,’ you know, the ones we make fun of for deleting DLLs that are taking up space, or who reboot their monitor. Every time we make a change to software used across the entire company, we have to put that 50% clear in our minds. How will this affect them? What training to we need to provide? We’ve pretty much accepted that no change will be universally accepted, and at a certain point we have to agree that this is ‘good enough’ for people, and deal with the fall out.

Coming back to Open Source, when a project like WordPress or Drupal makes a major change someone’s going to hate it. This is just the way of the world, and even if you love the change, you need to work to make sure your replies to these people aren’t ‘haters gonna hate!’ or ‘you suck!’ Neither of these are productive. Part of the problem here is that people get passionate and sulky, like a nine year old who viscerally dislikes something, but lacks the language to fully explain it. This is not to say people are incapable of explaining themselves, but that part of their problem is the ephemeral ‘feeling.’ The other major part of the problem is that no two people hold a hammer the exact same way. And of course that people who are complaining at the ‘beta’ stage of the product are in too late.

Understanding how these designs get made goes a long way into making people accept changes they don’t agree with. It doesn’t make them like the changes, but understanding how and why they happened can get you to the ‘agree to disagree’ point. John O’Nolan (who currently is living on the road by choice) wrote an amazingly informative post about how he got involved in WordPress UI back in the 3.0 days. He lays out how you can get involved more, if you’re inclined. There’s a great Make WordPress UI P2 blog, and of course WordPress Development blog that you can follow along to see what’s going on and there’s always looking at the tickets in Trac flagged for Needs User Experience/UI Feedback, but I’ve found the first way you should get involved is to start using WordPress trunk: the live latest and greatest, but not ready for prime time players, version.

That seems like a departure from theme, but it’s not. We all start out as basic WordPress users. We use the product, we know how to add/edit/remove posts, we move on to using plugins, and eventually we hit a wall. Either we start to adapt and become power users, who understand how to tweak things in wp-config.php, play with SSH/FTP, and make a quick child theme, or we resign ourselves to using WordPress as it is presented. Neither use-case is better or worse than the other. If you’re a ‘hard core’ WordPress user, though, you will find yourself wishing for small fixes, and you’ll make a plugin for yourself. Then you share it, and then you start to suggest things in the forums, or report bugs in trac. Now we’re cooking with fire, and it’s not long before you start tossing out code or css ideas for trac.

The point of this is that if you start ‘testing’ the new versions of WordPress at the beta or release candidate iteration, you are too late in the game to make a UI comment. The Beta and RC releases aren’t for making drastic changes, but for making the changes that are in there work correctly. Like how the ‘close’ button on the admin bar pointed isn’t working on IE 7 or 8. That’s a bug. But not liking the admin sidebar menu flyout and disagreeing with it entirely isn’t a bug. Did you know the head of the UI team didn’t like the Admin Bar back when it came about?

You don’t have to like everything about a product to use it, and sometimes changes mean you need to rethink how you use it. Also, WordPress has a policy similar to Apple and Amazon: Release, then iterate. That’s why in the last three releases of WordPress, we’ve had one major change and two noticeable tweaks to the whole admin UI. The 3.0 release was a huge overhaul, and in both 3.1 and 3.2 (and now 3.3) we’ve had significant variations on a theme. They feel big, but compare it to the 2.9 to 3.0 jump and it’s really pretty small.

If you want to guide WordPress’s UI, get in on it earlier than beta. If you want to iron out bugs, join at Beta, but take the time to learn the difference between ‘I don’t like…’ and ‘this is broken….’ If you want to get new features early, join at RC. If you want to wait till we’re ready to go, wait for the final release. If you just use WordPress and trust that most everything will work, use the final releases. If you’re annoyed that little bugs get missed, use RC. If you know you’re using a fringe case, or setup that uses normal WordPress but on an obscure server or configuration, RC or Beta is where we need you. Remember, not everything can be tested, but you can help test more. However. If WordPress is your life, if you live and die by WordPress and support people who use it or need to be testing it in your corporate environment, then you need to step up and start using SVN. Make a second install and set up a job to update every few hours, pay attention to release dates, and don’t treat this like ‘traditional’ software and wait for a release to be notified as to what’s going on.

But that is another post all together.

Perhaps the best thing about a cooperative design, like in an open source app, is that if you don’t like the changes, most of the time you can find someone else who doesn’t, and who wrote a plugin/extension to change it. When you compare that to, say, Microsoft Word, and remember that you, as a user, have very little say in things unless you luck into their market studies or beta tests, and even then, the locked down systems don’t always permit changes, well, you’ve actually got a lot of freedom. And if you’re not a techie, well, make friends with one or hire one. I hear a lot of them like beer.

26 October, 2011
Smart Servers

I upgraded the server that runs this site. Well, I should say I transferred from a traditional VPS on CentOS 4 32 bit server I’ve been on since 2009 to a CentOS 5, 64 bit, fully managed Smart Server.

What’s a Smart Server?

You know this whole cloud hosting thing? It’s like that, but not. I had serious concerns about the cloud. Certainly I was worried when I heard people running WordPress MultiSite had weird issues with caching and things not syncing up when new server slices were made. Reason enough to hold off for me. But then my host says “We have these in-between servers.”

LiquidWeb Smart Servers are kind of like Cloud Servers. First, I’m the only person on my server (which is a step up from VPS), and I have a set amount of bandwidth. I’m charged per-day, too, so if I need more CPU/Memory for a couple days, I only get charged for those days. That’s really nice. There’s a lot of normal ‘cloud’ features too, like I can spin up new images on the fly and use them (maybe 30 minutes total to do all that).

Yeah, 30 minutes. Thinking about how long it took to just migrate from host2 to gamera(Gamera (ガメラ?) is a giant, flying turtle from a popular series of kaiju (Japanese giant monster) films produced by Daiei Motion Picture Company in Japan. Created in 1965 to rival the success of Toho Studios’ Godzilla during the daikaiju boom of the mid-to-late 1960s, Gamera has gained fame and notoriety as a Japanese icon in his own right.), being able to move things around on the fly with only an hour of outage is nothing. When I moved my three WordPress sites, they took about an hour or so each (give or take). When I moved my forum with a 4gig database, it took about eight hours. We made jokes about how it was the size of Liechtenstein.(The problem with a 4gig database is when 400megs is in one table. Takes a long time, no matter what you do. The file copied over fast, but the exploding of it took long enough for me to nap.)

None of that was why I upgraded/moved though. The real reason for the upgrade was that my server’s been having weird issues, and most of my research said it was because I was on CentOS 4. I couldn’t upgrade SVN, I couldn’t upgrade PHP for much longer, and I was sure that come February 2012 (when CentOS 4 is EOLd) I was going to be increasingly in the cold. So I made a list of everything I’d ‘done’ to my server, all the upgrades and tweaks, and I went for broke.

For the most part, I can’t tell the difference between my old VPS and my new smart server other than the speed (much faster). What I did notice, and didn’t like, was that the memory tends to run ‘hot.’ With nothing going on at all, it was hitting 90% usage. With nothing going on for my old site, it’s at 50% (and normally hovered around 60-70%). Gamera definitely runs heavier, though I’m still using the old caching. I did have to up PHP memory to 64megs, from 32, after I ran into weird issues on one site, but for the most part, I’m in a ‘It Just Works’ state of mine. Oh and I will very much need to sort out external SSL, since everything’s on one IP now, and you can’t use multiple SSL like that.

Yet I’ve still not answered the question. What is a Smart Server anyway? Thankfully LiquidWeb isn’t the only site using this designation.

We know what Cloud Server is, and we know why it’s good. It’s flexible, it can add on memory and diskspace as I need it, and take it away if (when) I don’t. I’m charged for what I’m using, not a blanket ‘This is what I need on my worst day’ sort of deal. But the problem there is a lot of people actually need that flexibility but don’t have the brainpower to handle running their own server. Two years ago, I didn’t, that’s for sure. In fact, two years ago, Cloud scared me. But, just like VPS.net came up with Cloud Shared Hosting (which I jokingly called Cloud for Dummies), LiquidWeb and some other said that some of us really need a VPS, but we’d like some of those cloud features too.

This is the middle ground. Too many places were looking at Cloud Dedicated hosting, which is expensive, and not something we all need, and then was also that race to the cheap hosting. I pay $60 a month for my hosting, and it’s worth it. I know, it’s a lot of money to some people, but think on this: If I pick up the phone right now and call Tom, my sales guy, or Benny, the tech I know pretty well, they’ll take the time to help me. And if I call the 1-800 number at 1am? Someone is there who speaks English and knows what I’m talking about.(Not that I don’t love OffShore support, I know I love the ones at my office! Many of them are fantastic in their fields and well worth the price of admission. But too many companies force these intelligent people to stick to a script, and don’t teach them the hows and whys of the code, the company, and how to work with American customers. If you’re going to support Americans, you must learn how to deal with them, for better or for worse, you learn to deal with your customers. And yes, that means being fluent in their native language, and their technologies. This holds true for India, Mexico and that moron from Nebraska who wanted me to go into the registry on my Macintosh. AT&T.) So while I’m willing to pay more for someone who will bail me out, I’m not willing to pay more for something I don’t use. Like extra minutes on my cell phone, I don’t like to pay for hypothetical ‘in case I get the Digg effect or Matt links to me again’ CPU and memory.

While a Cloud Server would handle all that, it also requires consistent and constant management. You have to know what to expect, and be ready to go. Those of us who do all this as hobbies or as a side-gig don’t have the time. Also, sharing resources in the cloud makes some of us sketchy. The whole reason we self-host anyway is that we want to be in control. Cloud sharing started to sound a lot like Shared Hosting, which has issues of it’s own. Resource contention is s concern, as are bad neighbors. The cloud is great for hosts because it shares everything, and complicated for users because we don’t want to share.

It sounds a little repetitive to call this Cloud Light. In fact, it feels really repetitive to say “This is like a VPS, but with Cloud Add-ons.” Part of this is because understanding what the Cloud is, after decades of the old way, is hard for our brains to wrap around. For most of us, the cloud doesn’t matter. In fact, it barely matters for me. The cloud is really what the internet has always been to most of us: ephemeral and mystical. Don’t let the smoke out of the cloud, or your website will crash! See? You don’t know anything more than you did before, now do you?

The Cloud is synonymous with the Internet for many people, and I think the future of it is aimed that way. For me, having the ability not to be tied to hardware and to add on more space, memory and CPU as I need it is invaluable. Being priced reasonably for those things also makes me pleased. The Cloud gave me freedom, but a Smart Server gives me even more: the freedom to control my destiny on my server. And that’s just cool.

So what’s the downside? There are some.

Understanding memory usage has been the big issue. I mentioned before that Gamera uses 90% of the memory, normally, and after my database crash I came to understand why. See not being tied to hardware means I’m not tied to hardware memory either. So linux, being linux, uses up all the memory it can. I watched, and when I start doing more intensive stuff, like importing a 4G database, the memory dropped to about 75%, and then bounced back up to 80-90. This is what it’s supposed to do! When it starts running out of memory, it goes to swap. Now on the traditional VPS, this was bad. Swap meant you were ‘out’ of memory and about to crash. On a Smart VPS, this is okay. My swap sits around 10% right now until I clean it out.

Cleaning it out is where things get weird. Smart VPS memory doesn’t clean out. If I hot-swapped my memory, some genius at MIT sorted out I could actually read data off the memory. Of course, if you have the physical access to my server I have other problems. But swapping memory, well that means the computer swaps data to the hard disk and back to your RAM as needed. I’m not entirely sure how this all works, and I’m doing some research now (and asking the tech from last night for info he said he had about all this). As for the crash… My database crashed on Saturday because the table was 600mb, and the space I’d allocated for swapping like that was 400mb. Liquidweb’s support moved the SQL temp drive to a place with more space to allow for that and everything started working again.

SSL was pretty straightforward. I bought an extra IP, since it’s cheaper and easier than sorting out multiple domains on 1-IP for SSL for only two domains. The other domains don’t need SSL yet, so they can wait until WHM catches up with SNI and other weird acronyms you don’t care about.

Basically, I’m very happy. I’ve even started to forget it’s something novel.

24 October, 2011