The cloud ate my homework

In mid-August I got an email athat made me do a real double-take.  The subject line read:  Legacy Service End of Life – Action Required. 

Action Required:

Legacy Service End of Life

Dear Kim,

We’ve been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud.

For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we’d like to walk you through a few options.

We understand this might be an inconvenience for you, but we have a plan and options to make this transition as easy as possible.  We’ve been developing more functionality on our new cloud infrastructure, the Joyent Cloud, for our customers who care about performance, resiliency and security.  Now’s the time to take advantage of all the new capabilities you don’t have today. Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results.

As a new user to the Joyent Cloud, you are eligible to take advantage of Joyent Cloud’s 30-Day Free Trial using this promotional code… [etc. – Kim]

Sincerely,

Jason Hoffman
Founder and CTO
Joyent
jason@joyent.com

Of course I spend a lot of my time thinking about the cloud: people who’ve heard me speak recently know that I’ve increasingly become a zealot about the new capabilities it opens up, the API economy and all that..

So I suppose that getting a pail of cold salt water thrown in my face by joyent was probably a good thing!  Imagine telling customers their infrastructure will be shut down within three months in an “action required” email!

We understand this might be an inconvenience for you.

Or even more surrealistic, after the hurricane,

We want you to take the time you need to focus on your personal safety, so we are extending the migration deadline from October 31, 2012 to the end of day Wednesday, November 7, 2012.

By the way, don’t think I was using a free service or an unreasonably priced plan.  I had been on a joyent “dedicated accelerator” for many years with an upgraded support plan – on which I only ever made a single call.  This site was the very one that was breached due to a wordpress cross-site scipting bug as described here [note that my view of Joyent as a professional outfit has completely changed in light of the 2 month fork-lift ultimatum they have sent our way].

Anyway, to make a long and illuminating story short, I’ve decided to leave joyent in the dust and move towards something more professionally run.  Joyent served up what has to be one of the nightmare cloud scenarios – the kind that can only give the cloud a bad name.  Note to self:  Read fine print on service end-of-lfe.  Tell customers to do same.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken advantage of the platform change to move to the latest version of wordpress.  This meant paying the price for all the modifications to wordpress I had made over the years to experiment with InfoCards, OpenID, U-Prove, SAML, WS-Trust and the like on a non-Microsoft platform.

So friends, please bear with me while I get through this – with a major goal of keeping all the history of the site intact.  There are still “major kinks” I’m working out – including dealing with the picture in the theme, re-enabling comments and porting the old category system to the new wordpress mechanisms [categories now work – Kim].  None the less if you see things that remain broken please email me or contact me by twitter or linkedin.

OK – I now “throw the big DNS switch in the sky” and take you over to the new version of Identityblog.

Published by

Kim Cameron

Work on identity.