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Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

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21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[insert sound of loud cheering from those of us that have a clue -- again] Upvote. Sorry that there probably aren't enough people with a firm grasp on reality to lift your comment out of the hazy twilight. Take heart in knowing that the scent of coffee is getting stronger with every passing day.

Heh - I was beginning to wonder if it was making its intended impression on anyone. Must've been downvoted by AMZN longs :)

shoulda written it in sarcastica font or perhaps woosh-sans

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#22

Does 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.

See the last comment from SL's Kevin Hazard. They're aware of this post at the executive level, at least.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#23
Wow this post was like reading a post from myself in the not so distant future. We had the exact same experience on SoftLayer CloudLayer. Random I/O failures, read-only mode and of course the most frustrating part was the support process around that.

We had a week last month where we would lose a couple boxes a day to this issue at which point we said enough was enough and switched completely over to dedicated boxes (still from SoftLayer). Everything has been smooth sailing since.

To their credit SoftLayer (and probably more specifically our awesome account rep) stepped up and refunded us our money we spent on the CloudLayer in March (after some cajoling on my part) but their general reaction is one of a company that's completely disjointed. When I got really pissed and started bitching on twitter in March I received inbound contacts from multiple people on their sales/marketing/account mgmt team. Unfortunately these people didn't seem to be well connected to each other and are even less connected from IT (so they could empathize but not really affect change) and "management" (this faceless part of the company which seems to love to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face).

The oddest (and probably most infuriating) part of the whole thing is how everyone at SoftLayer went to great lengths not to acknowledge that the CloudLayer product had issues. They always seemed shocked by my assertion that something was very wrong with CloudLayer product and asserted that I was alone in seeing these issues. To this day I've still not read a single "we know something's wrong and we're fixing it" post from them and that's the part that bothers me the most because it implies that their either incompetent or disingenious. Neither of which are a trait you want in an infrastructure provider.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#24
post #23

Wow this post was like reading a post from myself in the not so distant future. We had the exact same experience on SoftLayer CloudLayer. Random I/O failures, read-only mode and of course the most frustrating part was the support process around that. We had a week last month where we would lose a couple boxes a day to this issue at which point we said enough was enough and switched completely over to dedicated boxes…

Damn, this is exactly what I was experiencing: when I'd ask "wtf? how comes your management would not see the trend" I' d constantly receive "you're the only customer experiencing this problem!" bullshit.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#25

"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 an…

There's 0 chance that you'll be able to respond to a 2400% increase in traffic/usage in under 43 seconds! You don't need to be on a cloud to support that. Dedicated is so much cheaper/more powerful than typical cloud machines that you can have a surplus of machines ready for your bidding and still pay less than the cloud +end up with way more processing power. Also, you don't need to own/mange the hardware- Hosting c…

Yeah, even if one could scale up his web/app farms 2400% so fast, I'd really like to see a database that scales up/out this well :-)

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#26
post #12

I was running softlayer dedicated boxes for about 18 months. It was a much better experience than what looks like a horrible cloud setup.

Yeah, we run 100+ dedicated boxes for 3 years now and our experience is really great. Hence the rant - why couldn't they provide the same quality of service and support for their cloud offering?

Because cloud computing is a more complicated way of delivering CPU, memory, disk (space and performance) and network. Complicated always has a much lower likelihood of being better, more durable, cheaper or more reliable.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#27
post #15

Yet another opaque cloud, where a vendor uses some disingenuous language to disguise or confuse exactly how much resources you are actually getting for your money. Cores != hyperthreads. Don't get me started on "dynos" or "small", "large" and "extra large".

at least Heroku are pretty upfront about what a dyno is

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos (linked from http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-0)

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#28
I find it fascinating that cloud has become almost a synonym for rapid provisioning and VPS based systems. I think this is really short sighted. Having a great uptime or latency does not automatically follow from being able to spin up tons of servers. And being able to provision dedicated servers in hours is still pretty magic to me. If nothing else, focus on just provisioning is obscuring other critical issues like network connectivity and I/O bandwidth and latency.

mgkimsal is spot on with his (sarcastic) comment, you need to think for yourself.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#29
post #26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we run 100+ dedicated boxes for 3 years now and our experience is really great. Hence the rant - why couldn't they provide the same quality of service and support for their cloud offering?

Because cloud computing is a more complicated way of delivering CPU, memory, disk (space and performance) and network. Complicated always has a much lower likelihood of being better, more durable, cheaper or more reliable.

You know, we never complained about cpu, memory, disk or network performance. The only real complaints were about the fact that no cloud instances had uptime of more than a week. I'm totally OK with shit being slow (we could always optimize or scale out), but when it is plain broken - this is when I need to wake up and fix things.

Re: Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 0 chance that you'll be able to respond to a 2400% increase in traffic/usage in under 43 seconds! You don't need to be on a cloud to support that. Dedicated is so much cheaper/more powerful than typical cloud machines that you can have a surplus of machines ready for your bidding and still pay less than the cloud +end up with way more processing power. Also, you don't need to own/mange the hardware- Hosting c…

Yeah, even if one could scale up his web/app farms 2400% so fast, I'd really like to see a database that scales up/out this well :-)

You should look into NoSQL. It's web scale!
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