"As your headcount increases, operations becomes a specialty, and you'll face your first challenge...There's always some friction between the proactive and reactive groups." Another of my columns for The Web Host Industry Review. [Blogarithms]
Another great, common sense article from Doug. You would be surprised how little common sense there is out there when it comes to operations.
I spent all weekend working on network cutovers for our Internet data center environment. We were creating a staging/testing environment in order to test a complete cutover to a new network, insert new firewalls and load balancers into the environment, and move our farms to a new location in the same data center that optimizes rack space consumption and network usage. This is the start of the end of a year long project that I started as a consultant and am ending as an employee. It is also the start of operationalizing Internet applications and the entire environment in the data center. Operationalizing means establishing processes, procedures, standards, and automation for application and infrastructure support. This is the general idea, actually executing is a much larger and difficult task than it sounds.
