Including Everything Blog

Archive for November, 2008

So a couple days from the last outage, here we go again with Mosso.  At this point, I have executives knowing about the issue and I’m pulling our site away from Mosso.  We host newsletter content, portfolios and other things that need to be “up”.  Having content linked from an HTML newsletter go offline 10 minutes after sending a newsletter mailing sucks, and that’s happened to me before with Mosso.

Yes, pun was intended.

I have serious doubts about the “cloud” computing concept recently and that it’s a failed concept.  We have yet to see a successful execution of the cloud hosting idea to the point where there is a stable solution in place with such a level of redundancy that applications and websites are not down for any reason.  I’ve experienced outages with Mosso lately that I’ve become discontent with.  The reasoning behind choosing a company like Media Temple, Mosso or Amazon EC2 services is so that you are not experiencing downtime…ever.  

I’m stuck in a difficult place, because I realize the outage discovery phase’s necessity in determining a cause of failure, however, it’s been hours and nobody’s found anything…that sorta causes you to wonder if the idea of cloud computing really works (or at least if it’s been implemented correctly at the datacenter layer).  I know that things don’t just break on their own typically, and so I’m curious if someone rolled out an update that went bad, a switch dead (hey, hardware fails – I get it).  My next question would be: “why did they roll it out before testing in a beta environment?”.

I have optimistically waited for stability in the Mosso cloud hosting service that we’re unfortunately realizing is not there.  Maybe someday down the line it will be, but we’re faced with a scenario where I spoke up for Mosso to sell it to us internally since I have long-favored the Rackspace brand.  I figured that with Rackspace’s financial and infrastructure backing, that it might come with the same types of safety nets we’ve become used to with Rackspace in terms of high availability application hosting.

I’m not normally one to pull the plug inadvertently, but this has become somewhat habitual (8 incidents within the past 7-day week).  Those aren’t exactly excellent percentages.  I think instead of the SliceHost purchase and rolling out of the CloudFS service, Rackspace should be focusing on the stability of the current idea/concept of cloud hosting to make it rock solid before presuming to add more services to a foundation that hasn’t proven itself as 100% stable.

I have a lot of love for the Rackspace family and have been working with their teams both directly and indirectly for 7+ years.  I don’t intend to bow out completely, but I’m not sure it’s logical for us to continue to place trust in Mosso with the types of outages this past 3-6 months.

Maybe I have an incorrect view of what cloud hosting actually is supposed to be.  I imagine that if one piece of the equation is unavailable, that the others failover pieces are are able to serve content, justifying that the services are never really offline to the end user requesting the content.  In my opinion, no services can come offline using this method.  The idea that there is an infrastructure so robust in place behind the scenes is one that will execute this properly.

What do you think?

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about recession and layoffs in 2008.  Recession is a tough thing for everyone, and with the holiday season approaching, it’s difficult to tell how the retail season is going to swing this year.  Several companies are announcing cuts, yet others are beefing up their workforce in anticipation of a busy purchasing season.  It’s interesting to see the dynamic in how the various industries are either profiting or fizzling out.

Last April, Citi set layoffs of 17,000 people, or about 5% of its more than 300,000 employees.  Circuit City announced a few weeks ago that they are closing 155 stores and cutting thousands of jobs.  The company said that it has been warned about being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, due to a share price below $1 for over 30 days.  AMD, Intel Corporation’s arch nemesis, is declaring a layoff round of 500 employees as well.  Comp USA is entirely online now with shipping, having closed all of their retail stores within the past year.

Yet, companies like Best Buy, although repositioning a couple stores in our area to be near more densely populated areas, seem to be doing well.  The stores are packed, every time I’m in there and prices are as competitive as ever.

In the new presidency under Obama, we may begin to see an explosion of recession-proof jobs in 2009.  Several areas expected to remain strong include:

• education
• energy
• health care
• international business
• environmental sector
• security

Other planned layoffs…

Hewlett-Packard announced back in September that it will be laying off about 8% of its workforce – about 24,600 employees.

Legg Mason, Baltimore’s third-largest public company, and employed about 1,100 people as of January 2008, is planning layoffs.

Goldman Sachs announced October 23rd that it will be laying off about 10% of its work force as the downturn in the credit and lending markets continues.

Yahoo! is looking to cut 1,500 jobs as it struggles to deal with a crumbling economy that ate away at its third-quarter profit.  This represents roughly 10% of their 15,000 employees.

The state of Virginia is expecting ot lay off 570 state workers.  The job cuts are the worst in five years in Virginia.  The Democratic governor says the state is likely to be at least $970 million short this year and may be up to $1.5 billion short in the fiscal year that begins next summer.

Coca Cola is planning cuts in its IT department, which currently has about 1,100 employees.  They will be told in mid-November of the status of their position.  Pink slips will be handed out by the end of the year.

Sony Ericsson will lay off 450 employees at the company’s R&D department in North Carolina.  With plummeting profits over the past two quarters, the company has said it will have to cut workers from the payroll.

Yesterday AMD reported that it terminated five hundreds jobs worldwide in an effort to cut costs and achieve a $1.5 billion “breakeven.”  Stock prices have also fallen, closing at $2.65 per share as of October 28, dropping nearly 90 percent since early 2006.  Currently Intel Corporation owns roughly 80 percent of the microprocessor market, leaving AMD the remaining 20 percent.