Briefs on Ansible, Issue 63
September 1, 2015
Hey folks,
Below I discuss the future of the newsletter and a little on how to have systems that are 100X or more lower cost than your competitors.
I discovered Ansible two years ago when writing the book Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, Ansible and I was really blown away with Ansible's simplicity and ease-of-use. I could see it was a huge game-changer for systems. What used to take me weeks in Puppet or Chef took me hours in Ansible. Since then I advocated for Ansible and helped many clients transition to it.
While I love Ansible, I found that my focus was broader than that single tool and I often missed featuring other impressive systems tools and concepts. Rather than neglect broader systems topics while focusing too narrowly on the newsletter, I planned to combine both newsletters into one called Conquer Complexity.
Two Companies
What would I cover in the new newsletter? The story of two former clients and their systems. Company names were anonymized and the cost of engineering hours was included.
Intrepid had $115 million per year in revenue and was very profitable. They had zero system administrators, four servers, and systems cost of about $2,500/month. That was roughly $260 of systems cost per $1,000,000 of revenue.
Titanic had $5 million per year in revenue, $5 million in VC funding, and was not yet profitable. They had three system administrators, twenty servers, and systems cost of about $60,000/month. That was roughly $144,000 of systems cost per $1,000,000 of revenue.
So Titanic was spending about 550 times what Intrepid was in revenue-relative terms.
That kind of difference would seem extreme for almost anything else, but this level of systems waste is common in our industry and often ignored.
Simple Systems
I frequently get emails asking whether I would join a startup as their DevOps person and help set up auto-scaling, multi-region redundancy, Docker, Hadoop, Cassandra, and the other so-called essentials.
The problem is that most new startups need zero of those things. Most web companies can scale to over $100 million in annual revenue and still not need any of those things.
The culture of systems advice has been deeply corrupted. Engineers often want to build complex systems that demonstrate how impressive they are. Customers do not care how cool your systems are. Every hour wasted on unnecessary system complexity is an hour that does not go into building a great product for your customer.
The future direction was focused on creating extremely simple, low-cost, scalable systems, and also covering how to salvage and rescue complex legacy systems.
Housekeeping
For Ansible-only updates, I pointed readers to the Ansible Announcements Google Group.
P.S. Sometimes when I discuss this topic, engineers recognize their own overly complex and expensive systems and feel shame. Shame is counter-productive and not the goal. The point is making progress from wherever your systems are right now and not worrying about the past.