Over the weekend I got a new job, working for an American company who do cloud management.

 

I know it sounds really geeky, but I'm so excited about it I could burst. Nice salary, Bupa care paid up for me, half paid up for the missus and the kids, work from home and expenses paid trips to London for 2 - 3 days a month, 3 separate one week visits to California each yeah and my usual full 4 weeks holiday per year. Plus I get to go back to being a super-techie instead of the crappy, old-sounding-job of IT Manager!

 

As if all that wasn't enough, I've just found out tonight, my first California trip is May 7th!!!!! I'm only starting with the company on May 2nd!

 

The best part of it all is that I won't be working in insurance anymore! :D

fantastic news for you alex, well done :thumbup1:

Dunno about that yet, Rose has just bought a Galant VR4 again, similar to the one we had before we left NZ. Z is coming off the road in the next couple of weeks and going in the garage to be dismantled, I've pretty much decided that the state of the shell as I take it apart will tell me what to do. I read something Big_Jim said about breaking the car then finding out just how good it really was in the process, so I figure, I'll take it all apart as if I'm going to break it, then decide whether I want to put it all back together again properly :D lol

Congrats mate, sounds really good

LMAO if I lent it to you I'd never get it back! You'd gimme back a standard one with the plaque on it :D

 

BTW thanks for the congrats guys :)

If I break it, you have first dibs on the ECU lol

sounds like youve done great mate. so what exactly does cloud management involve?

Well a cloud is a cluster of computers, sharing resources, offering almost full redundancy against power failure, network failure, hardware failure etc. If you launch a server in a cloud, it is 99.9999999999% guaranteed not to fail in any of those categories.

 

The usable computers in a cloud, are called VMs (Virtual Machines) they don't actually exist in physical form, it's all software. What this company does, is provides a web based dashboard, to launch, control and shut down these servers easily, without having to know what the user is doing technically speaking.

 

I'm going to be doing two things, logging into those servers to fix faults that the customer can't fix and the first two lines of support can't fix either, and secondly helping to develop the software and scripts that run the dashboard, including the start-up scripts and un-attended install scripts.

 

The main advantage to this stuff, is when you think about fail-over and load balancing, you create 4 servers to do the job of one, then create the scripts, software and DNS entries to share out the workload amongst the 4 servers, that gives you better performance per server, however you do have problems occasionally, where the stuff doesn't work and someone like me has to log in and fix it. Some of the start-up scripts are designed to automatically launch and configure a new server on demand, because the other 4 servers are getting too heavily loaded.

 

EA Games are one of the clients, so they run their gaming servers on the platform :D

 

Sorry if that bored anyone. :D

sounds complicated lol sounds like a good company to get into though

not bored just didnt understand a bloody word:rofl:

 

Surely you understood "the"?

 

Oh no wait .... :clap:

Sounds interesting, what's the company ?

Rightscale

 

They're based in Santa Barbara, California, although they have satellite offices around the world, including mine, which is in the slightly less attractively named, Hammersmith. lol

Very nice mate, im a network techy, so more than likely i have been in a few data-centres and seen all your companies equipment :)

Excellent news mate - good luck in your new job!!

 

Richard:sorcerer:

Fab news, sounds awesome, well done x

Sounds great! My ideal job! :D Never lucky enough to find something like that though. Congrats mate!

Congratulations buddy, sounds perfect......:thumbup1::clap:

Well done mate,

 

Nice to hear positive news echoing around the forum again!

 

Only job I've heard of where its perfectly acceptable to have your head in the clouds!

 

Nice one

only job i've heard of where its perfectly acceptable to have your head in the clouds!

 

Nice one

 

roflmfao!

You forgot to say head in clouds AND chewing eucalyptus dear. (his missus who insisted we buy the 300 btw- hi all)

Well done fella :balloon::clap::thumbup:

smithy