BSOFH: the roar of the packets, the smell of the cloud.
“Boss, are you in there?” the Intern quavered as he heard his voice echoing in the cavernous space.
“Sure, come on in,” I yelled, and brought the forklift to a slower amble down the improvised corridor of the warehouse floor. “Watch out, don’t trip on the—oh well, too late.”
I hustled over to pick him up off the cable pile. He was still looking around wild-eyed. “What have you done now??”
“I’m reinventing myself as a services provider, my boy. Welcome to the new hosting facility for Quantum Cloud, LLC.”
“I can’t believe ... where did you ... my god, it’s full of racks,” he said. “You’re going to be a cloud provider?”
“Already am,” I said. “We’re all about quick, seamless provisioning, you know. I’ve got my first set of customers already up and running over in Sector R.” I pointed over to a far corner. “It’s easy as setting up a blog—easier, in fact, because there’s less creative thinking involved and you don’t have to know how to spell.”
A chime sounded near the front door. “Uh-oh,” I said. “One of my customers. And if I’m not mistaken, that guy with him has AUDITOR written all over him.”
The customer didn’t look happy. “See here,” he said, “I’m exercising my right to audit as listed in the service contract. This is Edgar, from BowyerShipwrightHoopleMidbanks. He’ll be collecting the audit data and examining the configurations.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Come right this way. I have the Audit Table all set up for you. All the materials are there, in those three binders. Help yourself.” As they seated themselves, I started shooing the Intern back towards the rushing sound of the fans in the live corner.
“Hang on,” said Edgar. “I have a list of questions that I need you to answer. And when do I get a login to the system?”
“I’m sorry,” I replied, “but we don’t answer questions. Access is strictly prohibited to all but Quantum Cloud employees. The information for your audit is in the binders.”
“But ... the contract says I have a right to audit!” stammered the customer.
“Indeed it does. But it doesn’t state what constitutes an audit, and it doesn’t allow you any privileged access on the hosts. Remember, this is cloud computing—we simply provide the services and run the underlying platforms for you; you’re not supposed to know or care about the technical details.”
“Can’t I at least interview one of your staff?” asked Edgar impatiently. “You! Over there! A few minutes, please.” The technician got up slowly from his console and warily approached us, looking to me for cues. “Is this really your only administrator? Where are the others?”
“Oh, he can do it all by himself. We found the BEST cloud administrator! He’s worth at least five regular sysadmins.”
“Why? Is he Cloud Certified?” the customer wanted to know.
“No, but his name is WIN!” I said cheerfully. “You can’t get better than that!”
“Um, actually, it’s Wim,” mumbled the technician.
“Close enough,” I said. “Anyway, you don’t need as many people to run a cloud; all the controls are integrated into one console. All Win here has to do is click on the menus and move the little icons around on the dashboard.”
“Can we see the console?” asked Edgar.
“Of course not! That’s proprietary,” I replied. “All of our resource monitoring, management, load balancing and environmental controls are our own design; we don’t share them with anybody.”
“And security?”
“Oh, right. Security. Sure,” I said.
“Excuse me, I have a conference call,” squeaked the Intern and headed for the door. He’d heard enough.
“But ... we need to audit against the service level agreement,” said Edgar desperately. “We need to make sure you’re really providing the resources on demand.”
“Well, it isn’t really on DEMAND,” I hedged. “It’s more like resources on entreaty. If you complete enough paperwork and enter a new trouble ticket every day for, oh, about six weeks, we might agree to allocate some more of whatever it is you need. Memory is fastest; we can just steal it from one of the other customers and they generally don’t notice.”
The customer’s face, which had been acquiring a robust claret hue, suddenly went the color of chardonnay instead. “Do you mean—have you ever taken any from OUR systems?”
“Sure—we just move it around to whoever’s yelling the loudest at the time. We’re all about dynamic allocation, you know. Agility. Orchestration. All those cool words. It’s really all just juggling.”
“That dynamic allocation was supposed to make our services perform faster!” he snarled. “Quantum Cloud! Services at the speed of light!”
“I’m afraid you misunderstood the marketing,” I said smoothly. “The dynamic, self-adjusting service orchestration is for US, not for any given customer. We run a multi-tenancy operation here. Our agility allows us to react instantly to fulfill our business needs and recover from ... potential disasters,” I said, gesturing with my chin at Edgar.
“That’s it! We’re terminating our contract,” bellowed the customer. “I want our data transferred out of here as soon as I get another provider. Tonight at the latest!”
“Oh, we can’t do it tonight,” I said. “Maintenance window. Downloading patches is going to saturate our Internet connection. It’s only residential cable service. Besides, we’ll have to figure out where all your data is stored.”
“You mean, you don’t KNOW??” He was hyperventilating now. Edgar dropped his BlackBerry and grabbed him under the arms to hold him up.
“Well, we have a pretty good idea. I mean, we can calculate it with high probability. That’s what the ‘Quantum’ part means. Win here is a particle physicist.”
“How long will it take him to find the data and transfer it back?” whispered the auditor as he fanned his client’s face.
“I don’t know, that’s not his job. We’ll have to call our Cloud Migration Manager. He was responsible for moving your applications in the first place and making them standardized to fit our efficiency model. To be honest, I’m not sure what shape your data is in right now; I don’t know what he did with it to make it work.”
I picked up the desk phone from the table and punched two buttons. “Get Procrustes on the line, will you?”
There was a double thud behind me. I sighed and went back to start up the forklift. It’s so difficult to get customers to leave once they get into your workspace.
Simon Travaglia rocks the house
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