Month: May 2012

Cloud & Architectures

May 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This is a great post about how the world of IT is changing. I would somewhat disagree in one area though. I don’t think it’s so black and white between datacenter and “cloud” approaches. Even if you’re running your own metal, it’s still moving in the direction of the cloud. Most organizations, even with their own DCs will still run a hypervisor of some sort and manage their IT infrastructure dynamically via APIs. The question is really going to be whether you’re going to run on a private or a public cloud or a hybrid version.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/7/startups-are-creating-a-new-system-of-the-world-for-it.html

 

Who is working?

May 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This happened at one of the companies where I worked. My place was in a small office and the entire wall was taken up by a large TV, where we rotated various dashboards/health checks from our monitoring. One of the screens was monitoring our Apache servers.

A very nice woman came into the office, chatted with me for a little bit and then started looking at the screen with a puzzled expression. She then asked what was on there. This was great, since it wasn’t often that people showed interest in what we do.  I explained in laymen’s terms what were monitoring and why. However, she seemed particularly interested in the Apache monitoring screen. Some of the graphs on there were tracking the relative amounts of free/busy worker processes.

After I explained what it was, she seemed very relieved and said: “Oh, this is great. I always walked by the office and I thought you were tracking which employees were working or slacking off”.