The Power of the Internet

Over the past month and a half, I’ve had two occasions where I directly experienced the true power the Internet gives us as consumers.

Visit Fees

The first incident had to do with getting Christmas lights installed on the house.  In our old home, the house was single story with a relatively low pitch roof, so I had no problems installing lights myself.  However, the house we live in now is two story and with a high pitch roof, so with the decision of wanting to keep the ability to walk (by not falling off the roof), I chose to pay for installation last year.  The company I chose was a recommendation by a neighbor, and had already done several homes in the neighborhood.  The deal is, you purchase the lights once and pay for install and take down.  They will replace bulbs and store your lights for free and subsequent installs are cheaper, paying for labor only. Sounds great, right?  Anyway, they came out, did their thing, were a little late and had some broken bulbs in the yard, but no big deal….all was good.

Christmas time rolls around this year, it’s the first week of November, I’m at UDS and my wife gets a call from the company about re-installation.  The price quoted was a bit higher than I expected, given it was just for installation and take-down, so I told my wife not to get them..deciding that we should shop around.  Now there is some discrepancies with the details of the conversation, but I was told that this was done…cool.  A couple weeks roll by, and I’m sitting in my home office…making Ubuntu kick ass for the cloud, and I notice a truck pull up, with some men and Christmas lights in the back.  Now knowing my neighbors were getting lights installed and that I wasn’t, I paid no mind and continued working….until I heard a ladder being placed against my house and saw a man with lights in his hand in my yard.  I quickly ran outside and told them I hadn’t requested lights this year, and there must have been a misunderstanding, he was fine with it and moved on to our neighbors house to install their lights….everything going fine so far.

Later that evening, my wife gets a call from the owner, asking if perhaps his guys went to the wrong house for our order.  She explains that she was under the impression that because she never gave him a credit card number, and he never called back to confirm install, that there was no installation occurring (for the record, apparently they had called and left a message that they were coming to install lights that morning, but neither one of us were home, and I hadn’t noticed the message indicator on the phone). The owner then proceeded to say he understood and that he normally charges $50 for a travel fee, but would cut us a break for $25. Uhh…WTF?!  Why am I being charged for his mistake? Especially when he had to come out any way for the neighbor’s house.  Well needless to say, I called him back expressing my dissatisfaction with the charge, and that I wasn’t going to pay it.  The owner proceeded to tell me my wife had agreed to the visit (no proof of course), that he was trying to run a business and he lost money by us cancelling a slot he could have filled, and that it was “only $25″.  At this point, my eyes go green as I begin to Hulk out and I tell him that:

1. I trust my wife and you never sent an invoice, email, or letter confirming the purchase (leaving a message on the day of the visit doesn’t count with me, sorry)
2. You were already coming to our neighborhood, so you lost 30min at most…of which I was sure he could fill due to the “backlog and crazy rush” they told me they had…hence the pressure to install early.
3. If it’s “only $25″ then he didn’t need to bill me for it.

Then I hung up, reaffirming that I was not going to pay a $25 visit fee.  Still livid, I then posted this to facebook and decided to let my opinion count..on Yelp:

“Christmas Guys are crap.  I ordered lights last year, and their install crew arrived late and left broken bulbs all over my property.  They called back this year to re-install my lights for $350…not even $50 less than the 1st installation, that supposedly included purchase costs of the bulbs.  My wife told them we’d think about it, they went ahead and scheduled the install.  Luckily I was home, and told the crew I didn’t want the lights and they proceeded to install on the neighbors 3 doors down.  Josh calls us that evening saying we owed a $50 trip fee, for service I never confirmed…claiming he lost business because of the cancellation.  I told him I wouldn’t pay it, and then “reduced” it to $25…and said it was a small fee, so I told him if it’s so small, he doesn’t need it from me.  To top it all off, I never received the lights I supposedly purchased.”

After posting, I saw a couple other dissatisfied customer posts, and then felt a bit stupid for not checking Yelp! last year…before purchasing, but oh well.  So, then I tell myself, that I’m going to find a better deal.  Well that didn’t work…one company damn near doubled the price and would store them in my attic.  The other took days to call me back, wanted to charge me about $100 more, and I had to lease…yes LEASE the lights.

Just when I had given up hope, my wife got a call from the owner of the company. Apparently, a store he had setup a deal with decided to cancel the contract after seeing my post on Yelp!…justice!!!!  Of course now he wanted to “work something out”, in exchange for a follow-up posting.  Long story short, I got lights (at a reduced cost) and he got his follow up post. Had he simply said “sorry for the misunderstanding” in the first place, I would have eventually come back to him anyway…avoiding the conflict, the negative posting, and the loss of his contract (which I really do hope he got back).

Double Billing

The second occasion involved my hotel registration at the Sheraton Boston hotel for the LISA’12 conference earlier this month. I registered for the conference and used their code for hotel booking online, saving %30.  The original stay was 4 consecutive nights, and payment was pre-paid, non-refundable….makes sense to me.  I then reduced my stay to only 2 of those same 4 consecutive nights, again using the online booking system.  I expected no refund, and only changed it because I didn’t want my room given away for arriving 2 days late….figuring they might even be able to sell those freed 2 nights to someone else.  Well instead of just reducing my length of stay, the system decided to not only keep my $829.99, but charge me an additional $455.28, pre-paid, non-refundable fee for those 2 nights…uh, WTF?  After receiving my credit card statement and noticing the double billing, I went online and opened a ticket in Sheraton’s online chat system and had the following conversation with “Laila S.”:

ROBERT WILLIAMSON: I changed the check-in day for a reservation at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. The original reservation confirmation # was 655169251, with a prepay charge of $822.99 for 4 nights. The revised reservation confirmation # was 205201294, and a prepay charge of 455.28 for 2 nights. My credit card ended being billed a total of $1200+ for just 2 nights, and I wanted to know how to correct this, seeing how I did not *cancel* my reservation, only changed the check-in day.
Laila S.: Thank you for using Click to Chat, my name is Laila.
Laila S.: I am delighted to assist you today. One moment please.
Laila S.: I apologize for the delay and appreciate you patience.
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: sure, no problem
Laila S.: Are you okay to keep holding while I investigate this further?
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: sure
Laila S.: The first reservation you had was for a Standard Room and the reservation you have now is for a Junior Suite. A Junior Suite is a upgraded room so the rate is typically more.
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: the lady at checkin said the upgrade to the junior suite was complementary...as I have the original online receipt showing a standard room
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: the issue is that when I changed my checkin days
online, the system cancelled my original...charging me a cancellation fee
Laila S.: Ok. Thanks for clarifying. Whenever you re-book or change the dates for any reservation the rates and availability are subject to change ie increase or decrease.
Laila S.: Prepaid reservations are fully prepaid, non changeable and non refundable.
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: hmm...so basically Sheraton charged me twice for the same stay.
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: I can understand paying more to extend my stay...but I paid more to shorten it?
Laila S.: You got charged for changing a fully prepaid - non refundable non changeable reservation.
Laila S.: Most prepaid reservations can not be changed and if they are you are charged a forfeiture amount.
ROBERT WILLIAMSON: ok. I understand, though I'm pretty sure this is
policy is criminal, but I guess I'll have to speak to my lawyer on that.
Thanks

Now of course the lawyer thing at the end was bullshit, but hey…I was pissed, so why not throw it in.  Anyway, as with the previous incident, I let my frustrations be known…and I posted to Twitter…several times:

#starwood double charged me for a single stay @SheratonBoston as part of its “policy”. $455.28/2nights + $822.99/4nights(orig booking)! #WTF

— Robbie Williamson (@undacuvabrutha) December 22, 2011

“it was fully prepaid, non-refundable & non-changeable”, but I went down from 4 to 2 nights, same wk, & paid 4 both? #ffs #starwood #theft

— Robbie Williamson (@undacuvabrutha) December 22, 2011

I could have just said that I would be 2 days late, avoiding the $455.28 fee. Preferred guest my ass…never staying at #starwood again.

— Robbie Williamson (@undacuvabrutha) December 22, 2011

Minutes later, I received this tweet:

@undacuvabrutha We saw your tweet & would like to help. Could you follow us & DM us w/ your stay details so we can follow up w/ the hotel?

— Sheraton (@sheratonhotels) December 22, 2011

Long story short…I got the full $829.99 refunded back! For the record (and I told Sheraton this), I didn’t have a problem with the stay being non-refundable, and would have accepted  them keeping the full 4 night amount of $829.99 for the reduced 2 nights of stay.  However, taking the money for the full stay, and then taking more for the shortened time is effectively double billing, which I suspect is illegal in Massachusetts, as in most, if not all, states.  I suggested that perhaps the policy be amended, such that the time of stay for pre-paid, non-refundable bookings can be shortened at no penalty, but there is no reduction in what the customer has already pre-paid.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.

The Internet gives us a way to voice our opinions…in social status updates, online reviews, blogs, mailing lists, etc.  Don’t discount the power it gives you, when you feel you’ve been unfairly treated or slighted in anyway.  With that said, never forget that with great power comes great responsibility, as you could end up being in the wrong, and by making a public statement about it, open yourself up to embarrassment and beratement.  In both cases, my intention was never to take away business or harm their images….I just wanted to be treated fairly…ethically.  So in both instances I promptly made it clear in my tweets and Yelp! posting, that the respective business had done the right thing….because in the end, I feel that’s all we really want…for people and businesses to do the right thing.

Ubuntu is the OS for the Cloud, and here’s why…

Over the last few days, I felt the compelling need to explain why I think Ubuntu is the best operating system for the cloud. In my mind, it comes down to three key differentiators that I think benefit both users and the overall advancement of the cloud.

1: Ubuntu Supports the Latest Technologies

Cloud computing and the technologies surrounding it are advancing at an absolutely incredible pace of innovation.  Consider how fast OpenStack has matured in the last year, the recent explosion of Hadoop solutions, and the entire movement around Open Computing.  Legacy “enterprise” Linux solutions simply cannot keep up given their existing release processes.  Users of the cloud and other scale-out technologies can’t afford to wait years for the next supported release to come, especially when that release is destined to be out-of-date the day of release, due to the slow-moving technology transition model utilized by the distribution provider, i.e. opensource project foo releases at time A, then it gets into the “community” version of the release at time B six or more months later, then it *might* get put into the enterprise version at a much later time (years) C.

If you ask these legacy distributions why they move so slow, they’ll undoubtedly say it’s because they are aligning with the hardware release cycles of most server OEMs, which is absolutely true. This is why I’m so excited by the Open Compute Project and it’s potential to reduce what Andreas “Andy” Bechtolsheim recently called gratuitous differentiation in a keynote discussion at this year’s Open Compute Summit in NYC.  In short, most OEMs have traditionally introduced features that are more about customer lock-in, than really answering their customer’s needs, e.g. releasing a new blade, that requires a new bladecenter, that won’t work with the older model nor work in another OEMs bladecenter…or even worse, having special server racks to match their servers, that won’t work with anyone elses…insane! The only benefit I’ve seen from gratuitous server technology differentiation is that it’s probably a big reason why so many businesses have jumped to the cloud…where they don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore. Hopefully, we can avoid having different APIs and custom Linux distributions by each cloud service provider, as I feel these are just more attempts at customer lock-in, and don’t really provide that much value to the users themselves.

Legacy Linux distributions also like to tout their ABI compatibility, that they enforce for the benefit of their customers and ISV partners. The logic is that by guaranteeing ABI at the kernel and plumbing layer throughout a given release and its updates, ISVs and their customers are assured that their applications (assuming they don’t change) will work for the life of the release. Besides again fitting to the slow-paced legacy OEM server release model, this makes perfect sense in a legacy server software world too. An ISV can build a release once, and then issue fixes thereafter, until the next major release in a year or so. As we move toward a faster-paced, continuous integration, scale-out computing world, ABI compatibility becomes more of a hinderance than advantage for users. The rate of innovation is now so fast, that even packaging certain webscale applications is frowned upon by the upstreams that provide them because they don’t want their user’s experience limited to a distributions release cycle. Also, it becomes difficult, to sometimes impossible, for most of the legacy Linux distributions to introduce new hardware architectures, i.e. ARM server support, post release. Server OEMs are forced to either go through the pain of backporting huge amounts of code into a forked kernel (that receives little outside testing), slip out their own hardware roadmaps to match the distribution release cycle, or try to convince (usually with money) the legacy Linux distributor to issue some “special” release to accommodate them.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Support Model is Scale-out Friendly

Ubuntu is free, and Canonical has made the promise that it always will be. By free, we mean no license fees or paid subscriptions to receive updates. Around 10 years ago when the first legacy Linux distributions were coming about, the movement to a subscription-based model was seen as a revolutionary change in the software business. Instead of charging licenses at a per user base, which was the accepted model for operating systems and software as a whole at the time (in addition to support contracts), these companies had the ingenious approach of giving away the software, and creating an updates subscription model. Realizing that software requires updates, and that most (but not all) users will want them, they created a system that allowed them dependable, consistent revenue per installation, while giving customers the freedom to have as many users on the system they needed, as well as machines that simply sit and do their job, never needing an update (think mail or DNS server). Later on, they partnered with server OEMs and brilliantly started to differentiate these subscription costs based on the architectures and cpu cores of the hardware…learning tricks the OEMs had played with their own proprietary operating systems of the day.

The subscription + support model has done well…extremely well over the past decade, but in the cloud…in scale-out computing, the model begins to hurt…extremely in some cases. One of the main benefits of cloud computing is the ability to scale on demand. A given deployment can have a guest instance count in the low 10s for 6 months, but then need to scale out to the 100s or 1000s for another 4, returning back to original levels after peak demand has subsided, e.g. demands on online retail infrastructure increase dramatically during the holidays and then subside soon after. For a subscription-based model, these means customers must budget for an increase in fees to account for the scaling, and if they underestimate, their own profits are impacted because of it. Furthermore, making someone pay for fixes and security updates just seems wrong to me…what if Google or Mozilla started charging people for fixes and security updates for their web browsers…people would lose their minds. Finally, because applications (especially scale-out/webscale ones) are innovating so fast now…adopting new development methodologies like continuous integration, it’s unthinkable that someone would deploy software and never want the updates. Charging someone for fixes and updates is now as archaic as charging them for the number of users.

The service model is the next evolutionary step, away from the subscription model. It recognizes that a Linux distributors real value to the customer is the expertise they have from producing the distribution, having the upstream relationships, and knowing the integrated technologies, inside and out. Thus, the business model is built around the support and services they are able to provide because of their unique position, not the bug fixes and security updates that users should expect to get for the same cost as they received the original software…free.

Ubuntu’s Release Process is Dependable and Transparent

To the average consumer, I suspect the Ubuntu release cadence is not much more than a nice thing to have. There’s no need to speculate on when the next release is, or what it will have, because we plan transparently. While we always deliver on a 6 month cadence, users aren’t forced to upgrade that often, as we support each release for 18 months…and up to 5 years for the LTS that comes every 2 years. And yet, despite having such a predictable release cycle, we still manage to generate more growing excitement for each one (personally that’s just amazing to me).

Now if you’re someone deploying a private cloud, a solution into a cloud, or even releasing hardware focused at the cloud, the cadence becomes less of a “nice thing” and more of a necessity. Whether your planning a hardware or software release, being able to depend on an operating system release schedule not slipping is a huge benefit and relief. There are enough internal moving parts to any significant software or hardware release project, then add the rapid pace of cloud innovation, and no one wants to then worry that your entire business plan can be jeopardized by the OS vendor slipping out their release schedule…to accommodate a partner, possibly even your direct competitor.

A dependable, transparent release process not only provides peace of mind, it allows for the best possible collaboration. Transparency allows users, partners, and upstreams alike, to observe and influence the direction of each Ubuntu release. There’s no waiting for the first pre-release ISO to see if your feature made it in, or if this next ISO will boots on your new hardware, because you can track every bug and feature work item. As part of our transparent and dependable process, we produce pre-release Ubuntu ISOs and cloud images daily. While each daily isn’t guaranteed to be installable, bootable, or tested to the level of an alpha or beta release, it’s usually good enough to give users and partners something to sniff out and provide feedback on…giving them confidence their cloud solution that depends on our OS won’t be in jeopardy at release. You won’t find this with legacy Linux distributions…not even their closest business partners get this level of access.

We’re Not Perfect…

As I’ve said in the past, Canonical’s investment in Ubuntu Server is focused on cloud computing. So to be clear – While we have a tremendous community to look after the quality of support for traditional server workloads and a solid inheritance of dependability and stability from Debian, I would be lying to you if I said Ubuntu is the best choice for every type of server deployment. Hell, I challenge anyone to name one operating system that really is. All I’m saying is that Ubuntu is the best operating system for cloud computing….and Canonical will continue to focus our innovation to ensure it stays that way.

Smart != Success

The Back Story

Having been in the technology field all my adult life, as both a student and professional, I’m used to working with extremely bright people…what most would consider people with “high I.Q.s”.  I have friends and family who often characterize me as being “smart” or a “genius”, of which I usually respond with a smile…and then let them know right away…that there are loads more people I know and work with much smarter than I.  I take great pride in my ignorance, as it keeps me humble and hungry for improvement and knowledge.  In my quest for “less ignorance” I recently decided to re-read a book I picked up years back, when I was studying for my Engineering Management masters degree…recent events had me questioning certain truths I hold dear, so I figured I should re-evaluate them.   The book is called “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, by Daniel Goleman, PhD.  Doctor Goleman is an excepted expert of behavioral and brain sciences, and has a series of books on the subject of emotional intelligence.  I stumbled across his earlier book, simply called “Emotional Intelligence” while in a book store, and just the book jacket synopsis was enough for me to buy it…and I’ve been a true believer of the concept ever since.  Basically, he argues that how we’ve typically defined and measured “intelligence” has been far to narrow, ignoring a critical range of abilities that matter tremendously in determining how we succeed in life.  How do we explain why people with high IQs fail in life, while those with average traditional IQ scores succeeding amazingly well.  He suggests that factors such as self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, etc are incorrectly left out of typical I.Q. measurements, and that these should be included when evaluating an individuals capacity…that the emotional IQ is more important to success than most imagine.

Trained Emotional Incapacity

In Dr Goleman’s book, there’s short section called “The Computer Nerd: Trained Incapacity”, which resonated so much with me, that I felt the need to share it.  Goleman starts out with what most have observed, that many people in IT with high level of technical skill often have a hard time dealing with people.  He states that he used to think it was just a negative stereotype, or “cultural misperception”, because he assumed one’s emotional intelligence and traditional IQ were independent of each other.  However he continues to discuss how a colleague at MIT of his observed that people with extremely high levels of IQ often lacked social skills…that the smarter they are the less competent they seem to be emotionally and socially. “It’s as though the IQ muscle strengthened itself at the expense of muscles for personal and social competence.”  He writes about how the mastery of technical pursuits demanded long hours…often spent working alone…starting early on in childhood or teenage years….a critical period in emotional development.  He also states that self-selection plays a role, in that people lacking in sufficient emotional intelligence are probably drawn to study fields such as computer science or engineering…because cognitive excellence is stressed over anything else.

The Secret to Success

To be clear, Goleman is not implying that all high-IQ scientists are socially incompetent, that would be stupid.  However, what he is suggesting is that people with good emotional intelligence in a technology field are in high demand,i.e. someone with “high science skills and high social skills” has the potential to be a highly successful in an engineering or technical organization.  Dr. Goleman goes further to site a UC Berkeley study from the 1950s, where 80 PhD students in science were tested for IQ and personality competence, along with extensive interviews with psychologists, all to measure emotional balance and maturity, integrity, and interpersonal effectiveness.  Forty years later, researchers tracked the surviving students down and made estimates on their career success based on resumes, evaluations by experts in their field, and credible scientific publications.  The result was that the emotional intelligence abilities were four times more important in determining professional success and prestige than traditional IQ.

The Bottom Line

If you are in a technology field and interested in management or even team leadership, don’t assume that just because you can code the best or solve the most technically challenging problems the fastest, that you can lead or manage people.  On the flip side, if you find yourself sometimes struggling to keep up with other engineers on your team, or just not picking things up as quickly, don’t let that deter you from pursuing a leadership position.   There is more to succeeding as a leader than simply being the smartest person in the room.

Don’t Hate the Playa…Hate the Game!

So I was reading a recent article in NetworkWorld where once again, the “Canonical doesn’t give back” bullshit is raised.  The author seems to take a couple “jabs”  by bringing up Greg K-H’s infamous plumbers rant talk, the fact that Microsoft is in the top 10 of kernel contributors (and Canonical isn’t even top 30), and even says Canonical is unprofitable as “general understanding”…nice, thanks!  Thankfully, it seems from the comments, that people see this as the sensationalized, we-need-click-through-traffic journalism it is.  I could go into an epic long posting of how wrong the basis for the “doesn’t give back” argument is, or take jabs at other distros profitability, how they got there or why they were sold…but I won’t.  Instead, I’d like to issue a bit of urban education on those of you who seem to hate Canonical/Ubuntu because it succeeds where others have failed.

Seriously.  I just recently discovered I was a hater myself.  If you ask my wife my reaction to an iPhone or iPad commercial, she’ll tell you that I get visibly irritated.  At first I thought it was because I felt Apple seems to appeal to the elite, or that they seem to sell their products as life changing devices that only the cool people have….and I have a tendency to hate exclusion (probably b/c I was that black, overweight band nerd/computer geek in a predominantly white school growing up, and one tends to have issues with those who exclude after that….but I’ll spare you my self-therapy posting ).  However, after watching a CNBC special on Steve Jobs (before the retirement announcement/insanity),  and then reading all the articles about Jobs once he announced his stepdown as CEO, I got to thinking….why should I dislike a man/company that succeeded where others before have failed….even if those others invented the PC-era or help lead the revolution into a desktop-based operating system.  I mean, why should I have less respect for Apple because they decided to move past the old paradigms of just making the computer faster, or the OS easier to run applications…to being something easier for people to use….something that helps define who they are?  Hell…that’s brilliance!

Bottom Line:  Just because someone or some company succeeds with less perceived effort/people, more funding, in a faster time, or in a better organizational model than you, don’t blame them for it….blame yourself for not adjusting better/faster to win the game.

Interested in the progress towards Ubuntu Server 11.10?

Then check out the new status.ubuntu.com website .  In particular, you can not only see the usual work item status of the team, as well as individuals, but also progress towards the five areas I’ve called out as important for this cycle:

• ARM Server Support
• Ubuntu Orchestra for server deployment
• Ensemble for service orchestration
• Being the best cloud infrastructure provider
• Being the best cloud guest operating system

 

Why Ubuntu Should Continue with Upstart for 11.10

So I just read Lennart Poettering’s “fair and balanced” review of sysvinit, upstart, and systemd….wow.  Looking at his comparison chart, we in Ubuntu must be idiots to not switch over to systemd immediately…especially since he clearly points out all the major distributions have done so (or plan to) already.   Once again, the evil Mark Shuttleworth must be dictating that Ubuntu must remain on upstart, oppressively pushing down all those who challenge his rule….whatever people.  So here’s the real reason why I think we should remain on upstart in 11.10, it’s because (as Mark mentioned today) we put users first.  Do I need to remind anyone of the pain we went through in Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) when we finally made the wholesale jump to upstart?  Sure, we achieved great boot performance gains, but it was painful, especially for Ubuntu Server, as it was largely neglected during that effort (and I’ll take the blame for that).  We spent the next release, Lucid, cleaning up behind ourselves….frantically working to get the next LTS in a respectable shape…and still, Ubuntu Server was neglected (again, blame me).

So here we are again, one release before an LTS…an LTS that is not only going to showcase the quality of the Desktop, but is going to be extremely important for Ubuntu Server, and people are asking us to switch to systemd?  Really??  We just got done improving upstart, making upstart play nicer with Server, rolled out a damn nice user guide, and even added some slick features (like  job and event visualization)…and we’re supposed to throw all that out and switch to systemd now?   The situation reminds me of a quote from one of the funniest (and probably worst) presidents in US history:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” -George Bush

But seriously (with all joking aside), I don’t want to go through a rushed change again, which is why I support staying on upstart for both 11.10 and 12.04 LTS, and then taking a serious look at the merits and drawbacks of moving to systemd going into the 12.10 cycle.  Basing a decision on what we feel is important to Ubuntu and it’s users, not Lennart.  By then, systemd will have another year to mature, we don’t have an impeding LTS release on our backs, and if Debian is to truly switch to systemd, then a year’s wait while that work goes on should only improve the chances of Ubuntu adopting it.

Lennart, if you by chance read this, can you please stop the campaign and badgering against us…it ultimately does you no good.  We aren’t pushing back because we don’t like you, or Fedora, or because Mark is forcing us to stay with upstart…it’s because we put users first.  While I agree upstart isn’t perfect, and certainly still causes server sysadmins pain in some situations, I’d rather deal with the problems we have with it , than take a leap of faith with systemd this close to an LTS.

Don’t count Eucalyptus out just yet…

Today I happened to run across the Eucalyptus 3.0 roadmap and was happy to see so many features planned, that have been requested by us and others for awhile now.  A lot of the features previously reserved for the commercial (and closed source) Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition are now being opensourced…and this is great! High Availability…User/Group management…LDAP integration…and support for Windows Guest Images are just a few.  With this announcement added to the current momentum and buzz behind OpenStack (Cactus coming this week…Diablo planning in 2 weeks!!)….and now VMWare has rolled out Cloud Foundry!!!  Boy oh boy….it’s looking like we’re in for a very interesting summer.