[chef-dev] Re: [chef] Re: Proposal: Moving from lists.opscode.com to googlegroups… any concerns/objec tions?

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:41 PM, Bryan Horstmann-Allen wrote:

> Outsourcing can work fine. It's how most businesses actually get paid. Are 
> you
> suggesting that Hosted Chef is bad business, for instance? ;-)

I didn't say that no outsourcing works, just that many types don't work.  At 
the very least, many types of outsourcing don't provide anything remotely 
close to the level of cost savings as was used to justify the action.

Where outsourcing can work well is when you look at increasing the value of 
the resulting product, as opposed to simply cutting costs.  There's a limit 
to how much you can cut costs, and every time you add an administrative 
barrier between any two sets of resources, that barrier comes with some 
additional costs of its own, many of which are unlikely to be known in 
advance.  On the flip side, there is no limit to how much you can increase 
the value of a product.

IMO, Hosted Chef falls on the "increased value" side of that equation.

> The issue Jesse (I'm guessing) is trying to solve is that managing email 
> sucks,
> and he'd rather have his guys working on his actual product than dealing 
> with
> their network provider dropping PTRs again (lots of chef mail held in my
> discards for require_ptr, sadly.)
> 
> Brad and I are on some of the same super secret email admin lists, so we
> breathe this particular brand of sewage, but it may be he's forgotten that
> managing email sucks if you don't have your email respirator handy.

I'm willing to admit that possibility.  I guess it all comes down to the 
actual day-to-day problems that Jesse is trying to fix.  I certainly didn't 
see anything in his previous message that alluded to outsourcing the 
"managing e-mail sucks" problem, but maybe I wasn't reading between the lines 
correctly.

> There's a huge win to be had from outsourcing email if your core competency 
> is
> not dealing with deliverability, antispam, and so forth. We outsource it at 
> my
> current dayjob to Google, and while I hate gmail, I am often very happy to
> never have to fix email myself.

I certainly got out of the business of managing e-mail, and I did manage to 
draft Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter to help with managing the e-mail 
and mailing list services for python.org -- as the authors of "The Book of 
Postfix", they certainly knew a lot more about that program than I did, and 
they were able to easily pick up what little advantage I had over them with 
regards to managing the Mailman part.

I have known for many years how hard it is to properly manage a mail system, 
and that's why my vanity domains have been hosted at Heller Information 
Systems (his.com) since the day they were created -- I know Paul Heller and 
his team, and I know that they can do a better job of managing my e-mail as 
one of their customers than I could do for myself.  At least I was able to 
avoid that "Cobblers Children" problem for my own personal e-mail during the 
times I was doing large-scale mail system administration/engineering for my 
various employers.


If that's the problem Jesse is trying to solve, then I'll sit back down and 
shut up, because even I was smart enough to finally get out of that business.

--
Brad Knowles 
<
 >
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>