3. On prem managed by dedicated in-house team in multi-colo setup. (We really really want to be here)
another major advantage of this kind of setup is that it is possible to give far better (technical support) to your customers, especially if you provide infrastructure services to your customers.
having a competent technical team which can do proper indepth analysis of issues customers are having has a massive positive impact on customer relations.
Compared to most technical escalations i have seen at most of the cloud providers, which comes down too "it was an internal problem, but is is fixed now, don't know if this will happen again".
> it is possible to give far better (technical support) to your customers, especially if you provide infrastructure services to your customers.
This is exactly why we want to do it. Being able to offer our customers a 100% vertical solution stack that we completely control & understand is a massive selling point in our industry (and hopefully others).
oh there is definitely a market for this, and cusotmers willing to pay for it.
at $job, me and another team member basically did technical deep dives into issues that occured for $customer. Usually they needed deep root cause analysis as of why something happened. (Mainly for insurance/legal/compensation reasons).
It was a ton of fun and we even got to a point where customers where willing to pay for this service when required. It costs us a lot of hours to do the troubleshooting, and not all customers have such requirements.
Some fun root causes i have found over the year:
- a bug in a firewall which resulted in kernel crash of the packet processing plane (and thus packet loss). We worked extensively with the vendor to fix this. This bug only occured because $company was using a custom TCP stack, and was sending ACK's incorrectly every X packets.
- tons of issues regarding time. Time drift on routers, time drift between processes inside a router. Time drift between hosts.(this happens a lot, and it makes me appriacate the fact that some routers have external clocks as a source option).
- quite a lof of issues with IPsec tunnels. For being a standard, i have never seen suchs a lot of edge cases with non-interoperability.
another major advantage of this kind of setup is that it is possible to give far better (technical support) to your customers, especially if you provide infrastructure services to your customers.
having a competent technical team which can do proper indepth analysis of issues customers are having has a massive positive impact on customer relations. Compared to most technical escalations i have seen at most of the cloud providers, which comes down too "it was an internal problem, but is is fixed now, don't know if this will happen again".