IBM Outages
cloud.ibm.com
cloud.ibm.com
SoftLayer has server times (I want to say 6? More than one less than 10) just lost a server on me. Just POOF gone. The number of emails I get from them is INSANE and I can't figure out how to limit them. There's constantly a problem at a datacenter. I don't know which ones to worry about. Sometimes things go read only for no reason. The list has gone on and on. My god, that new portal at IBM is HELL to use.
Thing is, I never even knew how bad it is there until I started using AWS. It's not a daily thing, or even a monthly thing, but it's for sure been once or twice a year some serious issue has caused trouble at SL. I have had maybe one problem with AWS in 5 years?
Tried complaining, but I'm way too small to matter. Like others have said "It's that bad". Sooner than later things will be all moved over.
IBMs “Watson cloud” had an incident of some sort, in some region, every single day.
It made me wonder if they were being honest and other providers don’t own up to everything or if it was just that bad.
The cloud console was miserably slow as well.
I had the misfortune of using IBM's SoftLayer for managing 40-50 virtual machines in 2017 or so. It was unimaginably slow. Shutdowns would take 15-20 minutes. RAM/CPU re-allocations would hang without status.
Sometimes I thought these commands were printed out in a datacenter somewhere and executed by a real person. Maybe that would've been faster actually.
I do think that they were being "more honest" than other cloud providers, since I've noticed that almost every PAAS or SAAS will have brief outages for small sections of the userbase that aren't mentioned on their status page, either out of laziness or for the PR.
Are you me? :)
Seriously though, the email alerts I've been getting (for the last 4 years I think?) have some sort of link in the footer that says "To change your Email Preferences, please go to [...]".
However, it's annoying right off the bat because it requires you to log in with some ancient set of credentials. When I finally got it working and logged in, I saw that all notifications/alerts are disabled anyway, and yet I end up getting a bunch of alert spam!
Yup, that matches my experience, that's (partially) why I called the site "unusable"
But take heart: it's worse if you're an internal customer, and internal customers have to use it.
I asked an IT guy at work why we have hard disks and he said we have some contract with HP that requires us to buy all hard disks and SSD through HP and they are expensive because enterprise support. Makes no sense to me.
but back to the topic, if you're an internal customer, can't you put pressure within the organization to improve the tools you use? If it is that slow, there must be some pretty low hanging fruits?
I couldn't use DB2 for www.ibm.com for years because of internal accounting rules requiring commercial licenses, while other accounting rules prohibited giving our group the budget for said licenses.
I'm sure everything is much better now that the cloud has descended.
So either they did have a lot of outages or their definition of outage included every instance where something was wrong but only customers doing A/B testing would notice sort of way.
Disclosure: I work for IBM.