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< Server
This is a draft document!
This document is a work-in-progress draft and has not been agreed upon yet.
This document is a work-in-progress draft and has not been agreed upon yet.
Discussion
Personas
- ‘application developer’ could be one right? someone who wants to build server applications
- ‘home/small business’ where they are constrained to one server/limited resources?
- ‘enterprise datacenter’ where they want to roll out many server instances and automate.
- A mid-level Microsoft administrator who does not have time for a steep learning curve.
Primary Personas
Persona #1: SysAdmin MacGuyver
Sandra Summers
Senior System Administrator; New Amsterdam Historical Society
"We're a small organization and we have limited resources... we just can't order new hardware for every new service request we get."
| Profile | SysAdmin MacGyver |
|---|---|
| Age | 36 |
| Location | Brooklyn, New York, USA |
| Technical Level | Advanced |
| Years Experience | 15 |
| Primary Tools | ? Not sure. Thinking about things like puppet, nagios, splunk, etc. |
| Referrals | Learns about new tech from team members, USENIX mailing lists, blogs |
Motivation
- Keep IT team within budget.
- Minimize late-night phone calls.
Goals
- Clean, secure, and manageable deployment of multiple server applications to a single server.
- Unified management of server resources.
- Ability to understand resource usage across server inventory to identify underutilized resources.
- Ability to easily deploy apps to underutilized resources.
Frustrations
- Home-grown scripts for deploying apps that have been around forever that have mysterious voodoo power. Difficult to reproduce application deployments consistently.
- Proliferation of various management console interfaces to have to manage.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >
Persona #2: DevOps
Joe Franklin
Ruby on Rails Freelancer; Joe, Inc.
"I want to build amazing, easy-to-deploy server applications for my clients."
| Profile | DevOps |
|---|---|
| Age | 27 |
| Location | San Francisco, California |
| Technical Level | Journeyman |
| Years Experience | 7 |
| Primary Tools | Uses a MacBook Pro as his workstation. Uses Ruby on Rails and Github. |
| Referrals | RubyWeekly, Ruby Insider, engadget, lifehacker, ... (?) |
Motivation
- Use the latest and best technology to solve interesting problems.
- Produce high-quality applications that excite my clients and build a great reputation for it.
- Grow my business and gain key clients.
Goals
- Agility
- Rapid recovery / rebuild of servers when they go down.
- Anticipating outages / becoming aware of outages before they happen or as soon as possible in order to mitigate them.
- Seamless migrations/upgrades of my applications.
- Expand cloud infrastructure on larger clients to also run in-house on bare-metal. (?)
(Perhaps not relevant to Server)
- Balance multiple ongoing development projects at the same time.
Frustrations
- Platform bugs that casue me to spend cycles porting my code forward. It's time-consuming and uninteresting work.
- Cloud providers that change their APIs in an incompatible way with little notice! Having to develop new connectors for production servers with only a few days' notice is not cool.
- Spending cycles packaging code up for an endless array of platforms - it's time-consuming and uninteresting work.
- Building software on a platform so old it doesn't have the python or ruby library I need and not being able to pull it in from out-of-stream.
- Being forced to build on top of or connect together poorly or undocumented platforms, and/or use weak platform APIs
- Frameworks configured by default to require a lot of customization. I want to start running right away instead of getting bogged down in that kind of detail.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >
Persona #3: Traditional App Developer
Joseph Simpson
Principal Application Developer, Defense Contractor
"Critical bugs could seriously injure real people, or worse. We have a strict regimen behind our development process to minimize risk."
| Profile | Traditional Developer |
|---|---|
| Age | 43 |
| Location | Washington, DC |
| Technical Level | Master |
| Years Experience | 22 |
| Primary Tools | Uses a Thinkpad as his workstation. (need more on server development tools) |
| Referrals | ACM? IEEE? USENIX? LISA? |
Motivation
- Keep the people interfacing with my software safe.
Goals
- Stability and predictability
- Minimize risk; vet every code change before it gets in and causes potential problems.
Frustrations
- Bureacracy - although I understand why it's in place, it takes the effort of moving a mountain to move a molehill in this codebase.
- Hardware vendors not supporting hardware for as long as we need to run it in the field.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >
Persona #4: Junior Enterprise SysAdmin
Andy Grant
Junior System Administrator; MegaBank, Inc.
"Automation is critical to managing a rollout to a server environment this large."
| Profile | Junior Enterprise SysAdmin |
|---|---|
| Age | 24 |
| Location | Jersey City, NJ |
| Technical Level | Apprentice |
| Years Experience | 2 |
| Primary Tools | bash, ssh, mutt, ? |
| Referrals | ? |
Motivation
- Avoiding screwups - I want to get noticed at my company and build a good reputation.
- Learn and become a better sysadmin.
Goals
- I manage the email infrastructure; my goal is 95% uptime this year.
- Minimize unplanned outages.
- <ugh what automation goals might he have with mail infra?>
Frustrations
- Bureacracy - I work at a large company, and it's really hard to make change happen here.
- Spending cycles porting code to an endless array of platforms – it’s time-consuming and uninteresting work
- Spammers - gunking up the works. One of the things that sucks about working on mail infrastructure.
- End-user interaction - it's hard to walk people through tasks on the phone, and we have a heterogeneous environment so I'm not always quite sure what mail client they are using.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >
Persona #5: Decision-Maker
Priya Moore
CTO, Cloud Startup
"..."
| Profile | Decision-Maker |
|---|---|
| Age | 31 |
| Location | Boston, MA |
| Technical Level | Advanced |
| Years Experience | 12 |
| Primary Tools | ? |
| Referrals | Fast Company, TED, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Forrester, Harvard Business Review, Reddit (???) |
Motivation
- Building a great company around great technology
Goals
- ?
Frustrations
- Incompabilities between platforms
- Too many technology choices - not sure which one is the right one to buy into.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >
Secondary Personas
Persona #6: Server Role Creator
Edward Bryant
System Administrator
"..."
| Profile | Fedora Server Contributor |
|---|---|
| Age | ---- |
| Location | ---- |
| Technical Level | ---- |
| Years Experience | ---- |
| Primary Tools | ? Not sure. Thinking about things like puppet, nagios, splunk, etc. |
| Referrals | ---- |
Motivation
- ?
Goals
- Create a new role for Fedora Server so that he can use Fedora Server for an application that doesn't currently have a role to support it. He would like this application to plug nicely into Fedora.
Frustrations
- New to Fedora community; not sure how to get involved.
Work Description
< description of a typical work day goes here. >