[Outages-discussion] [EXTERNAL] Re: [outages] Dreamhost MySQL outage?

[Chapman, Brad (NBCUniversal)]

Here's an insightful comment today from a redditor who claims to have worked at Flexential in the managed services side.

I looked him up on LinkedIn: he was in DevOps / SRE and worked there a total of 6 years.

Flexential sounds like a shit show, but he's also surprised that Cloudflare chose this place.  Either they didn't research it, or Flexential was doing a terrific snow job on them.

-Brad

Well, I'm not surprised in the slightest.

I didn't work on the Colo side -- I was in Managed Services, but our entire platform lived on top of the Colo stuff, so I had plenty of interaction with those folks.

Flexential is a company that was created out of mergers/acquisitions between ViaWest and Peak10 (both big Colo companies, the former mostly West of the Mississippi and the latter mostly East), and INetU, a Managed Services company with its own datacenter footprint.  After the mergers, the company culture went from one of the best I had ever been a part of (at INetU) to dismally bad.  All of the good employees left and it seemed like they only hired numbnutses to replace them.

Management is ineffective at best (toxic at worst), and routinely makes bad decisions.  Most of the good fortune the company has are due to either pure accidents that end up somehow leading to success (think: Mr. Magoo), or because the C-suite schmoozed some customer executive at a fancy steakhouse into giving them their business.

Their profits have been very bad (if existent) for years and they pinch pennies wherever possible.  Their infrastructure testing practices have gotten worse and worse as the good infrastructure people left the company and their replacements didn't know any better.

So yeah, I'm not surprised at all that they fucked up this badly -- I'm actually more surprised that Cloudflare put their core of operations at a Flexential datacenter.



—Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 5, 2023, at 4:57 PM, Benjamin Monjay <ke7dkg at gmail.com> wrote:


It's not PG&E, it's Portland General Electric. Here is the page on it.

https://portlandgeneral.com/save-money/save-money-business/dispatchable-standby-generators<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://portlandgeneral.com/save-money/save-money-business/dispatchable-standby-generators__;!!PIZeeW5wscynRQ!uNwsmiEi4zatJpF6NdfqCICp9FS1OR_5VzEd6SbLzPBBZC2G9KTlyLx5d835FSx_Z1NHsoO6jYBeduow$>

On Sun, Nov 5, 2023, 9:08 AM Jay R. Ashworth via Outages-discussion <outages-discussion at outages.org<mailto:outages-discussion at outages.org>> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chapman, Brad (NBCUniversal) via Outages-discussion" <outages-discussion at outages.org<mailto:outages-discussion at outages.org>>

> What do you make of the DSG power sharing program, with the generators being
> used to help the utilities? I had literally never heard of this before, and it
> seems like a risky idea on paper. Given PG&E's, uh, shall we say, less than
> stellar track record with safety and reliability...

I cannot speak to whether PG&E can *execute* the program outlined in that
flier, but, as far as I can see, they certainly answered all those questions
the way I would want to see them answered if I were a DC operator.

Their advantage is solely the availablity of extra spinning capacity; damn
near every other advantage inures to the genset owner.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com<mailto:jra at baylink.com>
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