Cloud Technology Myths. Part 1: about "useless" technical support and "clever" services
Karl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer and military writer, said: "The first task of any theory is to put in order vague and extremely confused concepts and ideas, and only by agreeing on names and concepts, one can hope clearly and easily succeed in considering questions." His treatise on the art of war was published in 1832, but this expression has not lost its relevance in our time, especially when we discuss certain technologies, such as clouds.
Over the past ten years, cloud computing has become a mature technology, but it is still surrounded by a halo of myths about management features, security, and business benefits. For this reason, today we want to discuss and debunk a few of the most common myths, using our own experience of developing a virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud.ru .
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/ photo reynermedia CC
Often people think that technical support specialists are little understanding employees who “sit” on the phone only in order to “fight back” from customers with standard phrases memorized with a piece of paper.
Perhaps this approach to the service was popular some time ago, but today, company executives understand that it is not enough just to provide quality service - you need to adequately serve customers. Periodically there are problems with any product or service, so users need to go somewhere for help. The more complex the product provided by the company, the more open it should be.
When it is possible to contact representatives of the organization on a variety of platforms (forums, blogs, channels in the Telegram), this allows you to create trust relationships. In this case, users are confident that if difficulties arise, they can quickly get help.
We in 1cloud believe that technical support is the face of the service, so we pay great attention to it. Our principle is that the inbox folder should be empty. If the client’s request remains unanswered for a long time, then this is considered a problem.
Today, our technical support works 365 days a year in 24/7 format, and the response time of employees to an incoming request does not exceed 5 minutes. The staff of this department consists of 30 people who are qualified and have a wide range of skills.
All mass calls are processed quickly and according to the standard procedure: regardless of the time of day, we organize a conference with the participation of responsible representatives in each area of ​​our work (network administrators, virtualization specialists, disk arrays, automation), which eliminates the issue of “fingering” the question from a specialist.
This approach once helped us quickly deal with the inaccessibility of a part of client virtual machines as a result of a DDoS attack. Then we solved the question in less than 15 minutes from the moment of receiving the first call from the client.
While organizing the support work, we followed the principles of ITIL (we recommend reading the book by Rob England (“Mastering ITIL. A skeptical guide for responsible persons”) by Rob England). We managed to distinguish three levels of support with varying degrees of responsibility. Employees of the first level have basic knowledge in the administration of the operating systems Windows, Linux and others, own infrastructure monitoring tools and have an idea of ​​the principles of its construction.
The second “line of defense” has specific knowledge of network infrastructure and data storage systems, and also owns a line of VMware software products: vCloud Director, vSphere, etc.
As for the third level of support, these people know the features of the implementation architecture of the IaaS provider 1cloud and have the skills of system administration and development on .NET, that is, they are engaged in the most complex and interesting tasks.
By creating technical support can not be approached carelessly and just sit a couple of people on the phone. It is necessary to constantly improve the quality of services provided, to increase the level of automation of processing user requests for existing services. This saves time for both the client and the call center employee.
Organizing the work of technical support, companies make serious mistakes. Very often one can observe how company executives do not discuss the mistakes of employees, do not give them advice on work. In 1cloud such “debriefing” is conducted at least once a week.
Employees should be able to competently communicate, quickly "extract" important information from the user in order to correct the problem as soon as possible, and also politely refuse the client in order to avoid conflict situations. The user of the service should not have the impression that he is not appreciated.
The technical support worker should be able to apologize for the mistakes made by the IT department, even if this is not the case. It does not matter to the user because of whom the problem arose, he needs someone who will take responsibility and help fix it.
At work, anything happens. Anything can fail, so engineers have to fix the equipment, and support staff explain the situation to customers. Each incident must be documented so that it can be determined what work has been done to improve the provision of IT services and what is being done at present.
This information is subsequently analyzed and, if necessary, appropriate changes are made to the rules of customer support. In this way, for example, we arrived at a three-tier structure of technical support. In addition, we carefully read the comments to the materials in the blog and are working to ensure that our IaaS services are not only useful, but also convenient.
This is another common myth that goes deep back to the moment of the emergence of virtualization. Although the first developments in this area began a long time ago, this technology was used for many years only in a narrow class of systems. This is where the confusion grows that it is difficult to work with virtual ones, and only large companies with large staff, large wallet and qualified engineers can afford it.
Today, the situation has changed dramatically, and companies from not only the Fortune-500 use the capabilities of virtual machines. Vendors of various virtualization platforms can cite as an example successful solutions implemented in banks, state and educational institutions, as well as hospitals and companies of various sizes. All these organizations enjoy the benefits of technology and save on maintenance, staff, and hardware.
In today's reality, virtualization, on the contrary, simplifies your work, and does not make it harder. The technology automates the time-consuming tasks that most IT staff spends.
For example, in a couple of clicks, custom server templates are created, new virtual machines are deployed. In a similar way, a private network is created — without this, the client does not need to have knowledge of VPN. In the case of traditional infrastructure, substantial financial injections and time costs would be required.
It is worth noting that our customers have the ability to manage their servers from third-party applications using the REST API . Once you have developed such an application, you can manage a virtual infrastructure (for example, from a mobile phone) from anywhere in the world. Here you can see an example of using the API: the “Action on server” method , which allows you to track the status of a specific task.
In the case of hosting, the API is useful both to private users who do not want to deal with complex technologies, and to large partners who are planning to create their own services based on the provider’s infrastructure.
Using the API methods, you can deploy the server in one request, while fully automating the tasks of managing the hosting (or, for example, scaling the infrastructure) without having to perform any actions with your hands in the interface.
This myth is a consequence of the previous one. Company executives believe that it is difficult to manage the infrastructure, so they want to hire a separate specialist to serve this cloud infrastructure. Yes, a qualified IT department will solve all the tasks in the best possible way, however, the providers themselves do everything possible to make it easier for users to work with their systems.
Consumers can easily and voluntarily use (or deactivate) additional computing power without contacting personnel and technicians on the side of the service provider.
Order calculator new virtual server
For example, our customers can change the hardware configurations of the servers themselves for a couple of clicks under current needs: increase CPU, RAM, HDD “on the fly”. Above is a calculator for ordering a new virtual server, and below is the resource configurator of the control panel.
Resource Configurator Control Panel
To understand at what point you should add computing power, it is also not necessary to communicate with the employees of the supplier and resort to the help of a separate expert. To this end, providers offer server tracking functions . This opportunity provides the company 1cloud. The ability to quickly assess the current load, allows the client to flexibly manage the infrastructure.
In our case, the user sees data on the CPU load, memory load, load on the communication channel and the average amount of read and recorded information per unit of time (image below).
Load data
At the same time, automated monitoring systems register an alert in case of failure of one of the infrastructure components, and also notify users of the critical load on the server.
Thus, it is not necessary to hire a separate engineer to work with the virtual infrastructure, since the cloud provider provides maximum transparent information about the state of the infrastructure. And if you still have any questions, then "on the wire" there is technical support, specialists of which are ready to advise at any time.
Friends, on this the first part of the analysis of myths came to an end. In subsequent posts, we plan to talk about misconceptions regarding the quality of services of domestic suppliers, and will address the security issues of the cloud environment. Subscribe to our blog to not miss anything.
PS Our materials on the development of IaaS-provider 1cloud :
Over the past ten years, cloud computing has become a mature technology, but it is still surrounded by a halo of myths about management features, security, and business benefits. For this reason, today we want to discuss and debunk a few of the most common myths, using our own experience of developing a virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud.ru .
')
/ photo reynermedia CC
Myth number 1: In tech support IaaS-provider sit do not understand anything "girls"
Often people think that technical support specialists are little understanding employees who “sit” on the phone only in order to “fight back” from customers with standard phrases memorized with a piece of paper.
Perhaps this approach to the service was popular some time ago, but today, company executives understand that it is not enough just to provide quality service - you need to adequately serve customers. Periodically there are problems with any product or service, so users need to go somewhere for help. The more complex the product provided by the company, the more open it should be.
When it is possible to contact representatives of the organization on a variety of platforms (forums, blogs, channels in the Telegram), this allows you to create trust relationships. In this case, users are confident that if difficulties arise, they can quickly get help.
We in 1cloud believe that technical support is the face of the service, so we pay great attention to it. Our principle is that the inbox folder should be empty. If the client’s request remains unanswered for a long time, then this is considered a problem.
Today, our technical support works 365 days a year in 24/7 format, and the response time of employees to an incoming request does not exceed 5 minutes. The staff of this department consists of 30 people who are qualified and have a wide range of skills.
All mass calls are processed quickly and according to the standard procedure: regardless of the time of day, we organize a conference with the participation of responsible representatives in each area of ​​our work (network administrators, virtualization specialists, disk arrays, automation), which eliminates the issue of “fingering” the question from a specialist.
This approach once helped us quickly deal with the inaccessibility of a part of client virtual machines as a result of a DDoS attack. Then we solved the question in less than 15 minutes from the moment of receiving the first call from the client.
While organizing the support work, we followed the principles of ITIL (we recommend reading the book by Rob England (“Mastering ITIL. A skeptical guide for responsible persons”) by Rob England). We managed to distinguish three levels of support with varying degrees of responsibility. Employees of the first level have basic knowledge in the administration of the operating systems Windows, Linux and others, own infrastructure monitoring tools and have an idea of ​​the principles of its construction.
The second “line of defense” has specific knowledge of network infrastructure and data storage systems, and also owns a line of VMware software products: vCloud Director, vSphere, etc.
As for the third level of support, these people know the features of the implementation architecture of the IaaS provider 1cloud and have the skills of system administration and development on .NET, that is, they are engaged in the most complex and interesting tasks.
Perfection is not the limit
By creating technical support can not be approached carelessly and just sit a couple of people on the phone. It is necessary to constantly improve the quality of services provided, to increase the level of automation of processing user requests for existing services. This saves time for both the client and the call center employee.
Organizing the work of technical support, companies make serious mistakes. Very often one can observe how company executives do not discuss the mistakes of employees, do not give them advice on work. In 1cloud such “debriefing” is conducted at least once a week.
Employees should be able to competently communicate, quickly "extract" important information from the user in order to correct the problem as soon as possible, and also politely refuse the client in order to avoid conflict situations. The user of the service should not have the impression that he is not appreciated.
The technical support worker should be able to apologize for the mistakes made by the IT department, even if this is not the case. It does not matter to the user because of whom the problem arose, he needs someone who will take responsibility and help fix it.
At work, anything happens. Anything can fail, so engineers have to fix the equipment, and support staff explain the situation to customers. Each incident must be documented so that it can be determined what work has been done to improve the provision of IT services and what is being done at present.
This information is subsequently analyzed and, if necessary, appropriate changes are made to the rules of customer support. In this way, for example, we arrived at a three-tier structure of technical support. In addition, we carefully read the comments to the materials in the blog and are working to ensure that our IaaS services are not only useful, but also convenient.
Myth # 2: Managing Virtual Infrastructure Is Tough
This is another common myth that goes deep back to the moment of the emergence of virtualization. Although the first developments in this area began a long time ago, this technology was used for many years only in a narrow class of systems. This is where the confusion grows that it is difficult to work with virtual ones, and only large companies with large staff, large wallet and qualified engineers can afford it.
Today, the situation has changed dramatically, and companies from not only the Fortune-500 use the capabilities of virtual machines. Vendors of various virtualization platforms can cite as an example successful solutions implemented in banks, state and educational institutions, as well as hospitals and companies of various sizes. All these organizations enjoy the benefits of technology and save on maintenance, staff, and hardware.
In today's reality, virtualization, on the contrary, simplifies your work, and does not make it harder. The technology automates the time-consuming tasks that most IT staff spends.
For example, in a couple of clicks, custom server templates are created, new virtual machines are deployed. In a similar way, a private network is created — without this, the client does not need to have knowledge of VPN. In the case of traditional infrastructure, substantial financial injections and time costs would be required.
Management from third-party applications
It is worth noting that our customers have the ability to manage their servers from third-party applications using the REST API . Once you have developed such an application, you can manage a virtual infrastructure (for example, from a mobile phone) from anywhere in the world. Here you can see an example of using the API: the “Action on server” method , which allows you to track the status of a specific task.
In the case of hosting, the API is useful both to private users who do not want to deal with complex technologies, and to large partners who are planning to create their own services based on the provider’s infrastructure.
Using the API methods, you can deploy the server in one request, while fully automating the tasks of managing the hosting (or, for example, scaling the infrastructure) without having to perform any actions with your hands in the interface.
Myth number 3: You need a specialist to serve the cloud infrastructure
This myth is a consequence of the previous one. Company executives believe that it is difficult to manage the infrastructure, so they want to hire a separate specialist to serve this cloud infrastructure. Yes, a qualified IT department will solve all the tasks in the best possible way, however, the providers themselves do everything possible to make it easier for users to work with their systems.
Consumers can easily and voluntarily use (or deactivate) additional computing power without contacting personnel and technicians on the side of the service provider.
Order calculator new virtual server
For example, our customers can change the hardware configurations of the servers themselves for a couple of clicks under current needs: increase CPU, RAM, HDD “on the fly”. Above is a calculator for ordering a new virtual server, and below is the resource configurator of the control panel.
Resource Configurator Control Panel
To understand at what point you should add computing power, it is also not necessary to communicate with the employees of the supplier and resort to the help of a separate expert. To this end, providers offer server tracking functions . This opportunity provides the company 1cloud. The ability to quickly assess the current load, allows the client to flexibly manage the infrastructure.
In our case, the user sees data on the CPU load, memory load, load on the communication channel and the average amount of read and recorded information per unit of time (image below).
Load data
At the same time, automated monitoring systems register an alert in case of failure of one of the infrastructure components, and also notify users of the critical load on the server.
Thus, it is not necessary to hire a separate engineer to work with the virtual infrastructure, since the cloud provider provides maximum transparent information about the state of the infrastructure. And if you still have any questions, then "on the wire" there is technical support, specialists of which are ready to advise at any time.
Friends, on this the first part of the analysis of myths came to an end. In subsequent posts, we plan to talk about misconceptions regarding the quality of services of domestic suppliers, and will address the security issues of the cloud environment. Subscribe to our blog to not miss anything.
PS Our materials on the development of IaaS-provider 1cloud :
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307930/
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