I had today one of the most bitter experiences from all my career in ALU.
The idea was to offer a HA web service to a 3rd party application.
I proposed a HAProxy based solution that would hide the internal structure of the media server cluster offering to the client application a single and reliable entry point. This would be in my opinion the standars approach for this kind of setups.
One of my line managers (not the direct one) had a brilliant idea. He suggested that the client should modify its application and add code that will do the load balancing and failover inside its software.
In vain I have tried to explain to him using technical and economical arguments that this is really not a good idea, he continually pushed its own vision.
I really do wonder how ALU will realize the so called "Application Enablement" with this kind of managers? I think that we have a looooong way to come until this wish would come true. The reason is not the technical competence - there are a lot of very talented people in ALU but the managerial lack of vision and the intestine wars.
As a conclusion - management has to be changed.
In the meanwhile have a look at http://www.openapiservice.com - it is one of ALU's first attempts to open towards web.
Wrong things happen when managers come with technical proposals (against architect's ones), the architect is implementing narrow features (like audit in AnnLab), the programmers are writing User Guides and are validating their own code corrections!
ReplyDelete