Simon Lyall's Blog

Arjin Lentz – creating the business you want

• – ex mysql
• – left when 500 people
• – growth in company revenue doesn’t always mean good elsewhere in business
• – remote services for mysql
• – no emergencies – time with daughter, sanity
• – started pre-GFC, prices reasonable, published, stuck to.
• – no emergencies = no worries after hours, do oncall infrastructure
• = Pool of people who won’t work weekends
• – biz processes = some cases no *real* reason why it’s done that way, but hard to change if other
• things depend on it.
• – hard to disrupt yourself
• – no borrowing, external funding etc.- big affect on how run. See rules
• – big growth , floating, being bought doesn’t always benifit customers
• – lives below the big companies, keep pricing below them
• – total value of biz-space is too small for “china” to enter
• – value curve, invest in different balance of value for your product than your competitors, feature set
• – nintendo wii, amazon
• – list of cool books
• – bigger clients require different sort of company to service

13 years of LWN – Johnathon Corbet

• – most audience lwn subscribers
• – establish 1998, 3 emplyees, x000 subscrbers, >100 company subs
• – Programmed Cray 1 – #3
• – drifted up to mid-level management in 96/97
• – little correlation between work and reward
• – Starting off “Linux Consulting” company ( eklektix.com ), start website to show how smart we are – not many $
• – we’ll do linux support – became linux support partner – program went away
• – linux training company – crowded market – didn’t work out
• – Maybe online news company
• – lesson – business skills matter
• – lesson where money coming from – pay attention to what customers want
• – be ready and will to change plans
• – acquired by tucows. went for mainly cash
• – seemed like good people, money over pure stock.
• – after dotcom crash, tucows handed back.
• – advertising revenue big drop from pre-crash
• – business very cyclical
• – real customers are the advertisers. Other sites did articles for advertising spend
• – Blocked microsoft.com, hard to block all the other variations for the name
• – other ads for dodgy products, soft core porn, political ads
• – ruins customer experience, javascript, flash, popups
• – hard audience to advertise to
• – donations didn’t work
• – July 2002 put up message that calling it quits
• – $35,000 in tip jar over 1 week. “why don’t you try subscriptions”
• – Nobody pays, Linux users less likely to pay.
• – listen to customers, especially when they are offering money
• – credit card company, reverted donation surge
• – credit cards,; extra feels for: discount rate, transaction fees, “international charges”, affinity charges, some arbitrarily
• – banks nervous about extending long to credit to merchants
• – chargebacks. customer always wins. 5 chargebacks over 10 years
• – credit card security, big dangers, huge potential downsides, pci compliance
• – credit card lessons, keep money from somewhere else
• – alternatives to Cc – 5% of stream, works okay, cost 4%
• – Checks – pain to deal with internationally
• – Corp PO cycle – big pain to deal with, Be patient
• – other services, amazon. Haven’t investigated heavily
• – lesson – have 6 months in the bank
• – where are we now
• – subscribers get access to feature content
• – free after 1-2 weeks
• – ability to disable advertising
• – other features
• – Basic cost $7/month , higher and lower cost alternatives, group subscriptions
• – aligns interests with our readers
• – people want to support us
• – subscriptions are a business expense for most people
• – non-cyclical
• – 2008
• – subs steady
• – adverting dies
• – many competitors die, freelancers writers more avaibale
• – amazon affiliate , not good results and then amazon pulled plug on all of Colorado
• – lots of revenue sources good. biggest business is 5% of revenue
• – why doesn’t it work. audience is too small
• – people don’t want to pay
• – we are terrible at selling
• – pricing is really hard, raised prices by 40%, minimal loss of subscribers
• – “design the business as a functioning system” – hard to do with periodical

Lindsay Holmwood – Devops

Consistency

• config managemnt – puppet
• puppet workflow – write->apply->debug
• testing via snapshots, apply,test, keep/revert
• puppet roles

Repeatability

• capistrano – cap-sub for config management
• railess-deploy (capistrano, externsion)

Visability

• Collectd
• git hub newsfeed
• mk-query-digest (slow sql queries)

Lots of ideas in his talk, far to quickly said for me to type them in a all in.

Deltaclound – David Jorm & Stephen Gordon

• Redhat project
• deploy workloads to multiple clouds (some, internal, some external, multiple vendors )
• free and open standards
• REST API that abstracts other cloud APIs. Drivers for different clouds.
• Support EC2 and Cloundfiles, others being worked on
• Build images, store, push to cloud provider and then deploy instances

Cloud Computing in Govt – Pia Waugh

• Cloud vendors vs govt people – Vendor gtee’d no personal data in their cloud
• SOA buzzwords drop straight in Cloud Buzzwords
• http://soafacts.com/
• Govt + cloud = $$$$ for vendors
• Lots of vendor hype, have to ask the hard questions
• Jurisdiction – govt data can’t go overseas
• standards – avoid vendors, technology lock-in
• data – reliability, what if vendor goes out of business
• AGIMO – official govt cloud strategy doc
• private vs public clouds
• Govt needs good advice
• To influence Govt – “be helpful”
• More consultation events planned in near future
• AGIMO actually using cloud for some things

Just a reminder that the Call for Papers for the Sysadmin Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2011 will close on Friday the 22nd of October (just 2 days away).

We have accepted 7 proposals so far and have a few more pending but we still have space.