Server/Personas/Interviews

Interview Queue

Folks who have volunteered to be interviewed but we haven't interviewed yet:

• davidstrauss
• jsmith

Interview #1: kdetony

• Works at a big energy company
• Works on a team of 6 sys admins, 2 in Peru, 4 in Chicago
• Manages approximately 1000 servers
  • Half and half physical/virtual (KVM and Xen Cloud)
  • All Java
  • Each environment is cloned, the differences are in the versions of mod_jk and/or JDK
  • Load-balancing configuration
  • Changes managed via scripts (shell vs python or perl depends on the complexity) - company policy requires these are written and maintained in-house only

Goals:

• Automate all the things!
• Better understand the status of all systems, including installed software and utilization of system resources.
• When modifying a system, define a recipe that describes the changes to make, then later do a diff on the system to see the correct functionality

Motivation:

• Likes the idea of being able to customize on the needs one can have

Frustrations:

• Production pushes where the JDK crashes.
• Production pushes where the VM has to be taken down and have its capacity raised before the new version of the application can be started.