Some top cloud tools to bash up the bus factor

Few business owners are willing to tolerate a low bus factor on critical endeavours. If your IT infrastructure is based on ten-year-old rebuilt hardware and a heavily customised version of Linux only one or two people truly understand, you’re in trouble. The simplest means by which the bus factor can be managed is to make the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes.

Old unix boxes tend to get a bit crufty. Especially overly enthousiastically setup things. "Linux from scratch", anyone? But they _are_ fixable. Certain other systems just become too brittle to touch and a full reinstall is the only way. Hope the last known-good backup is recent and recoverable. You did have backups, didn't you?

While I agree that pluriformity is a good example of non-simplicity if you want to interface to them all, advocating yet more complexity in the form of yet more layers of software to gloss over the differences does seem to be less than entirely honest. Yes, it's how IT has always done things. No, it's not necessarily a good idea.

OTOH, should we push for a single unified API to do "cloud-y" things? Discuss.

Other than that, Trevor, I'm a bit disappointed that you've apparently taken a bunch of products and threw them together. Not really a round-up of the kind you usually find in tech rags, the kind that isn't a review or even tells me much of anything, reason why I generally avoid such rags. This seems to be even lower on content, though maybe that's my expectations speaking.

Of course it's not worth your while to run all of those things in production for a good bit before producing another weekly column, but fsck it, couldn't you shake a more interesting story out of the "we'll never do this" queue in your ticketing system or something?

Apropos ticketing systems, find me one that will have true "email integration", meaning I can do bloody everything conceivable with it through email without ever having to touch any other interface. As treating email as a dumping ground for useless reports nobody reads anyway is usually all they do, and that just doesn't cut it.

There, found you a couple topics to earn the next few columns with. You can buy me a couple beers with those tokens should we ever meet.

[Trevor_Pott]

@AC

"OTOH, should we push for a single unified API to do "cloud-y" things? Discuss."

http://www.simplecloud.org/

"Apropos ticketing systems, find me one that will have true "email integration", meaning I can do bloody everything conceivable with it through email without ever having to touch any other interface."

Spiceworks isn't quite there yet, but it is very close. Spiceworks has an active community who often create plug-ins and extentions to the product bringing functionality the core application doesn't have. Spiceworks themselves are also very open to working with the community to meet feature requests.

Cheers,

--Trevor

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Simple Cloud API brings cloud technologies to PHP and the PHPilosophy to the cloud, [...]"

PHP itself isn't exactly simple (qv facebook's "hiphop" for an illustration though it's but another thing to prop php up with, but I digress), and the "PHPilosophy" appears to be "take any and all language features found anywhere at all, including abandoned in gutters and on scrapheaps, and bolt'em on". So, yeah, nice try but if it'll fly it'll fly like a pig: Requires sufficient thrust. And the comedown isn't pretty.

But the question wasn't how, but rather whether we should at all. Do we need another monoculture or is that not what we'd end up with?

As to spiceworks, I'll have to take a look; whether "plugins" is going to be enough or not depends on the architecture. And availability of suitable plugins, of course.

[Trevor_Pott]

@AC

Simplecloud but one example. Other projects exist.

As to Spiceworks, if you can't find a plug-in or feature you need...ask! You might be suprised at how helpful both the community and the company can be.

[Mayhem]

Spiceworks

Gets a good thumbs up from me for being an ideal tool for our small shop.

It does have one fault though, the support options are crap when it doesn't have an internet connection. It doesn't seem to be particularly designed for standalone installation, like for example you cannot download addins on another machine and install them locally, they have to be downloaded and installed by spiceworks itself.

That being said, the Support desk was happy to take a copy of our database and make the additions for us, but still, not the best solution.