Server/Personas

This is a draft document!

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.

Persona #1

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	MacGyver
Age	35
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

Joe Franklin

Ruby on Rails Freelancer; Joe, Inc.

"I want to build amazing, easy-to-deploy server applications for my clients."

Profile	----
Age	----
Location	----
Technical Level	----
Years Experience	----
Primary Tools	? Not sure. Thinking about things like puppet, nagios, splunk, etc.
Referrals	----

Motivation

• Build a great reputation for my work.
• Grow my business and gain key clients.

Goals

• Produce high-quality applications that excite my clients.
• Balance multiple ongoing development projects at the same time.
• Seamless migrations/upgrades of my applications.

Frustrations

• Spending cycles porting code to an endless array of platforms - it's time-consuming and uninteresting work.
• Spending cycles packaging code up for an endless array of platforms - it's time-consuming and uninteresting work.
• Maintaining older versions of my applications.
• Building software for 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

Andy Grant

Junior System Administrator; MegaBank, Inc.

"Automation is critical to managing a rollout to a server environment this large."

Profile	----
Age	----
Location	----
Technical Level	----
Years Experience	----
Primary Tools	? Not sure. Thinking about things like puppet, nagios, splunk, etc.
Referrals	----

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. >