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They want to be notified of anything that could potentially slow down their system. So any anomaly. The catch being is that they constantly change patterns because they introduce new workloads weekly - which wouldn’t be a problem if they could better communicate their forecasts. And that’s just one of a few dozen customers - again all with unique cluster configuration and needs.
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Yeah, it sucks. The first year was pretty great and we had a fully integrated and unified managed services team where we were getting some great automation done. Then they split the team in half in order to focus on a different flavor of our product (with an entirely new backend) and left folks who were newer (myself included) with maintaining the old product. We were even told that we should be doing minimal maintenance on the thing as the new product would be the new norm. Then once upper management remembered how contracts work, they decided we needed to support 3 new platforms without growing the team. All while onboarding new customers and growing the environment count. We’re now in operational overload after some turnover that was backfilled with offshore support that has a very minimal presence.
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I have tried championing this, but I don’t expect an ableist, masculinity shaming person like you to understand a call for social pointers on how to “manage up”.
“Man Up” - good lord, way to be an ass.
It’s not even a steaming pile of crap or anything. Since it’s basically a managed distributed database solution there’s limits to what we can do and maintain strong consistency. Things generally take a long time and are very sequentially dependent. So we have automation of course! Buuuut there’s very little comfort or trust in what is now very well exercised automation - which is the number 1 barrier in removing many sources of toil. Too many human “check this thing visually before proceeding” steps blocking an otherwise well automated process.
We are so damn close, but some key stakeholders keep wanting just one more thing in our platform support (We need ARM support, We need customer managed pki support, etc.) and we just don’t get the latitude we need to actually make things reliable. It’s like we’re Cloud Platform / DevOps / QA / and SRE rolled into one and they can’t seem to make up their damn mind on which rubric they decide to grade us on.
Hell they keep asking us to cut back our testing environment costs but demand new platform features tested at scale. We could solve it with a set of automated and standardized QA environments, but it’s almost impossible to get that type of work prioritized.
My direct manager is actually pretty great, but found herself completely powerless after a recent reorg that changed the director she reports to. So all the organizational progress we made was completely reset and we’re back to square one of having to explain what we want - except now we’re having “kubernetes!” shouted at us while we try to chart a path.
I’m already brushing up my resume, but I must say, the new Gen-AI dominated hiring landscape is weird and bad. Until then, I just have to do the best I can with this business politics hell.