Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
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Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#2> So, many times a week we would wake up, see an instance dead (all critical processes locked in D-state), call Softlayer, and spend hours (literally) to bring it back up.
Wouldn't keepalived or heartbeat help with failover? If I see an instance died, I would delete it and start a new instance with a latest backed up image. I assume it would take ~15 minutes compared to relying on the support.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#3Does anyone have any contacts at Softlayer?
This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things.
Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#4> So, many times a week we would wake up, see an instance dead (all critical processes locked in D-state), call Softlayer, and spend hours (literally) to bring it back up. Wouldn't keepalived or heartbeat help with failover? If I see an instance died, I would delete it and start a new instance with a latest backed up image. I assume it would take ~15 minutes compared to relying on the support.
The thing is, all our cloud instances were redundant so SL downtimes almost never caused real service disruptions on the site. But when one instance dies, there is a huge chance that other one (two, five, ten) will die soon as well. As for the automated kill/deploy scripts - really often even their own cloud-related portal features don't work (like when you try to restart/reset an instance and their APIs and portal just time out, etc).
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#5Does anyone have any contacts at Softlayer? This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things. Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
Seconded, I have been eying off their cloud service as a way to manage our server costs as we have some pretty wild but predictable swings in load throughout the day/week. We currently have dedicated hosting with Softlayer so a cloud in the same data centre as our existing databases etc would be great.
This however has made me pause, we are a small team and I like my sleep. A response would be awesome.
ps. pretty happy with Softlayer over all btw.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#6Does anyone have any contacts at Softlayer? This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things. Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
Seconded, I have been eying off their cloud service as a way to manage our server costs as we have some pretty wild but predictable swings in load throughout the day/week. We currently have dedicated hosting with Softlayer so a cloud in the same data centre as our existing databases etc would be great. This however has made me pause, we are a small team and I like my sleep. A response would be awesome. ps. pretty hap…
Yes, their dedicated servers hosting is just awesome - the best I've seen! But their cloud stuff is terrible and this is what made me really frustrated and guess about it being a 3rd party service poorly integrated - their cloud offering sucked, they could not offer any reasonable support for it, etc.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#7Does anyone have any contacts at Softlayer? This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things. Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
Seconded, I have been eying off their cloud service as a way to manage our server costs as we have some pretty wild but predictable swings in load throughout the day/week. We currently have dedicated hosting with Softlayer so a cloud in the same data centre as our existing databases etc would be great. This however has made me pause, we are a small team and I like my sleep. A response would be awesome. ps. pretty hap…
I've had great luck with Softlayer dedicated hosting in the past -- just as good as rackspace dedicated, and about half the cost. The only limitation was not being able to do custom VLANs between servers in multiple cabinets (which I needed for a multicast logging solution). I've never tried their cloud product, though (they should offer discounts to the hackernews affiliated organization...)
Disks seem to be the real weakness of all cloud solutions so far. Local storage is the only cost effective way to have high performance disk, and that makes provisioning cloud instances much harder. There might actually be some stuff to do in this space using dual-ported SAS or SATA with dual port SAS drives, purely for failover.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#8We had a good experience (from what I remember) with using Softlayer cloud to supplement our physical hardware when we had high load. We'd bring online ~5 cloud instances to handle the load.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#9Does anyone have any contacts at Softlayer? This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things. Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
Seconded, I have been eying off their cloud service as a way to manage our server costs as we have some pretty wild but predictable swings in load throughout the day/week. We currently have dedicated hosting with Softlayer so a cloud in the same data centre as our existing databases etc would be great. This however has made me pause, we are a small team and I like my sleep. A response would be awesome. ps. pretty hap…
My data on SL Cloud is about 6 months old now - but it's seriously far behind their dedicated offerring. A poor control panel lacking vital functions, frequent downtime, and slow io mire it.
Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
#10"This was enough and we’ve finally made the decision to give up and go back to real hardware only we control and manage. It took us more than a month of work, but we think we’ve got pretty good system built as the replacement for Softlayer cloud based solution."
This can't possibly be a good end solution! Haven't you read everyone else's blog posts and forum comments that there's no possible way you can ever build anything as good as _insert_vendor_name_here_ has done with their cloud?
There's 0 chance that you'll be able to respond to a 2400% increase in traffic/usage in under 43 seconds! And you'll never ever be able to replicate around the globe instantly, and even if you could, it'll cost so much more than _cloud_vendor_ because they have economies of scale you can never achieve. Ever. Seriously.
I just can't believe someone would consider - you know - owning and managing hardware that they control with their own SLAs and support people in place. Where's your sense of cloudsourcing?