Posts by TheOpsMgr66

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

The business case and the Finance hurdle have never been solved...

Agree 100%.

The root cause is that the "project mindset" never left the Finance Dept. In order to get a "project" approved you need a business case. The business case needs to guess at what it will cost and guess at what benefits will bring, then you subtract Guess A from Guess B to derive Guess C, the mythical Return, which you then decide again by Guess B to derive the all important Guess D, the ROI. You then line up all the projects in mythical guess D ROI order and do as many of them as your budget allows.

But in order to start this guess cascade you need to know what it will cost... And to do that you need to know how many people (Guess E) for how long (Guess F) plus whatever stuff you need eg infrastructure (Guess G) so you can add them up to derive Guess A.

And now amount of Agile or agile handwaving will ever change this...

Off topic but "Headley_Grange" because you're a music fan or some other reason? I live about 5 mins down the road (and I'm a Parish councillor for Headley!)

Basecamp decamps from cloud: 'Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal'

Re: It's not just the cloud

This whole article is so full of straw man fallacies it's like a Wizard of Oz convention held in a cornfield in Iowa on Halloween...

WTF does the design choices Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn made at DARPA back in the late 60s/early 70s have to do with whether you host in the cloud or not? That's just some kind of weird virtue signalling bollocks. And if you're trying to tell me that your self-hosted solution has a lower risk of going down than a well-architected multi-az or multi-region solution in AWS or Azure then you're smoking the curtains.

Anyway, regarding the economics, this is the key line is - "We're paying over half a million dollars per year for database (RDS) and search (ES) services from Amazon.".

So let's say I expect to make a gross profit of $1m this year. If I take this $500K of OPEX out, I make $500K nett profit in this years P&L.

If I can CAPITALISE that $500K and straight line amortize that over 4 years (i.e. $125K/yr) and I take that depreciation charge into the P&L then $1M-$125K = $875K and hey presto, I've made an extra $375K of profit this year, albeit I now have a depreciating asset on my balance sheet. But if my balance sheet is pretty healthy that's probably not much of a concern.

And it gets even better than that... if I am reporting to investors (or my annual bonus) is calculated from EBITDA (Earnings BEFORE interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization) my profit is now $1M... and perhaps my bonus target is now met and happy days...

So IMHO I'd bet that this whole move is driven by what the CFO wants to make the P&L look better, and all the rest is post hoc rationalisations.

OVHcloud datacenter 'lacked' automatic fire extinguishers, electrical cutoff

"You seem to believe the hyperscalers build their data centers to top tier standards. They do not. They really never have." wut?

Have you ever been on an Azure datacenter tour? Trust me, they are some of the best datacenters I've ever seen.

But even a quick browse of the public documentation shows that they have more redundacny that you seems to think they have... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/physical-security

"Availability zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. Availability zones allow you to run mission-critical applications with high availability and low-latency replication."