I had the misfortune of using IBM's SoftLayer for managing 40-50 virtual machines in 2017 or so. It was unimaginably slow. Shutdowns would take 15-20 minutes. RAM/CPU re-allocations would hang without status.
Sometimes I thought these commands were printed out in a datacenter somewhere and executed by a real person. Maybe that would've been faster actually.
Part of the reason why all applications suck on Microsoft Windows at "enterprise" companies is the intrusive malware (I believe I can call it that). My i3-2100 desktop at home with a hard disk and 8 GB RAM feels just about as slow as my i5-8400 desktop at work with also a hard disk and 16 GB RAM.
I asked an IT guy at work why we have hard disks and he said we have some contract with HP that requires us to buy all hard disks and SSD through HP and they are expensive because enterprise support. Makes no sense to me.
but back to the topic, if you're an internal customer, can't you put pressure within the organization to improve the tools you use? If it is that slow, there must be some pretty low hanging fruits?
I was IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s. Pretty much the only way I could get support to solve problems was for the web site to crash (and then it would be all hands and executives on deck, which was almost just as bad). e.g. we were mandated to use IBM’s rebadged CERN webserver (variously Lotus Go, Domino Go, Domino, etc) in 1995, but it couldn't handle the load and didn't have any of the fixes/enhancements I’d added to our build of NCSA. We finally cut over to it some time in early 1998. Two months later IBM killed it for an IBM build of Apache (which also didn't have any of the fixes or enhancements we'd made to NCSA and I was prohibited by corporate politics from adding them).
I couldn't use DB2 for www.ibm.com for years because of internal accounting rules requiring commercial licenses, while other accounting rules prohibited giving our group the budget for said licenses.
I'm sure everything is much better now that the cloud has descended.
I worked for a well known cloud BigCo. We'd have "widget on the website is down because something expired" or "data propagation is delayed on X systems" type outages pretty frequently. These are the kind of outages that you'd think was your browser and you'd hit f5 and it'd work but we'd notice them internally because we had monitoring. We had outages that would be noticed more than a hundred people worldwide (e.g. major widget down, service degraded enough for us to get support tickets about it) every three quarters or so.
So either they did have a lot of outages or their definition of outage included every instance where something was wrong but only customers doing A/B testing would notice sort of way.
I STILL can't figure out how to unsubscribe from those incident alerts. There's no link in the email to manage notification settings, and their website is unusable, so I just send them to spam now.
I do think that they were being "more honest" than other cloud providers, since I've noticed that almost every PAAS or SAAS will have brief outages for small sections of the userbase that aren't mentioned on their status page, either out of laziness or for the PR.
> I STILL can't figure out how to unsubscribe from those incident alerts. There's no link in the email to manage notification settings, and their website is unusable, so I just send them to spam now.
Are you me? :)
Seriously though, the email alerts I've been getting (for the last 4 years I think?) have some sort of link in the footer that says "To change your Email Preferences, please go to [...]".
However, it's annoying right off the bat because it requires you to log in with some ancient set of credentials. When I finally got it working and logged in, I saw that all notifications/alerts are disabled anyway, and yet I end up getting a bunch of alert spam!
Not sure anyone has used them or evaluated them before, but their literature used to go around claiming 100% uptime, which I found absurd. Unless someone has a plan for every conceivable threat (nuclear bomb, asteroid hitting the earth), no one should claim 100% uptime. More recent literature now claims 99.99% but even that might be too much.
I used to work for IBM and really there is no advantage. The few sales efforts I was involved in were shady af. Buying manger got something. Lets just leave it at that.
Really good Kubernetes (managed OpenShift as well) and Object Storage services (Cloud Object Storage). The Object Storage in particular has awesome durability and easy to use cross-regional capabilities where data is distributed across multiple MZRs in a region/continent VMWare, solid database options like Cloudant, and Watson APIs. Bare metal machines, no egress fees for databases.
I've been using SoftLayer for about ... I'm actually not sure. I think I started someplace that SoftLayer bought and then IBM bought SoftLayer. So I think I've been with them for about 15 years in some form. It's been so many years I can't even be sure how many. About 5 years ago I started using AWS and so for about 5 years I've been using both. I can not believe how much better AWS has been at the most basic things. I use nothing even remotely fancy, just some "servers" (call them VPS or EC2 or Bare Metal or whatever you want) to run some websites. Nothing is balanced or behind anything special or anything at all interesting.
SoftLayer has server times (I want to say 6? More than one less than 10) just lost a server on me. Just POOF gone. The number of emails I get from them is INSANE and I can't figure out how to limit them. There's constantly a problem at a datacenter. I don't know which ones to worry about. Sometimes things go read only for no reason. The list has gone on and on. My god, that new portal at IBM is HELL to use.
Thing is, I never even knew how bad it is there until I started using AWS. It's not a daily thing, or even a monthly thing, but it's for sure been once or twice a year some serious issue has caused trouble at SL. I have had maybe one problem with AWS in 5 years?
Tried complaining, but I'm way too small to matter. Like others have said "It's that bad". Sooner than later things will be all moved over.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadIBMs “Watson cloud” had an incident of some sort, in some region, every single day.
It made me wonder if they were being honest and other providers don’t own up to everything or if it was just that bad.
The cloud console was miserably slow as well.
I had the misfortune of using IBM's SoftLayer for managing 40-50 virtual machines in 2017 or so. It was unimaginably slow. Shutdowns would take 15-20 minutes. RAM/CPU re-allocations would hang without status.
Sometimes I thought these commands were printed out in a datacenter somewhere and executed by a real person. Maybe that would've been faster actually.
But take heart: it's worse if you're an internal customer, and internal customers have to use it.
I asked an IT guy at work why we have hard disks and he said we have some contract with HP that requires us to buy all hard disks and SSD through HP and they are expensive because enterprise support. Makes no sense to me.
but back to the topic, if you're an internal customer, can't you put pressure within the organization to improve the tools you use? If it is that slow, there must be some pretty low hanging fruits?
I couldn't use DB2 for www.ibm.com for years because of internal accounting rules requiring commercial licenses, while other accounting rules prohibited giving our group the budget for said licenses.
I'm sure everything is much better now that the cloud has descended.
So either they did have a lot of outages or their definition of outage included every instance where something was wrong but only customers doing A/B testing would notice sort of way.
I do think that they were being "more honest" than other cloud providers, since I've noticed that almost every PAAS or SAAS will have brief outages for small sections of the userbase that aren't mentioned on their status page, either out of laziness or for the PR.
Are you me? :)
Seriously though, the email alerts I've been getting (for the last 4 years I think?) have some sort of link in the footer that says "To change your Email Preferences, please go to [...]".
However, it's annoying right off the bat because it requires you to log in with some ancient set of credentials. When I finally got it working and logged in, I saw that all notifications/alerts are disabled anyway, and yet I end up getting a bunch of alert spam!
Yup, that matches my experience, that's (partially) why I called the site "unusable"
Disclosure: I work for IBM.
SoftLayer has server times (I want to say 6? More than one less than 10) just lost a server on me. Just POOF gone. The number of emails I get from them is INSANE and I can't figure out how to limit them. There's constantly a problem at a datacenter. I don't know which ones to worry about. Sometimes things go read only for no reason. The list has gone on and on. My god, that new portal at IBM is HELL to use.
Thing is, I never even knew how bad it is there until I started using AWS. It's not a daily thing, or even a monthly thing, but it's for sure been once or twice a year some serious issue has caused trouble at SL. I have had maybe one problem with AWS in 5 years?
Tried complaining, but I'm way too small to matter. Like others have said "It's that bad". Sooner than later things will be all moved over.