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Dealer.com Sites are Down!!!

Ah yes, I should clarify and be careful with the 'server' term -- but yes, VMs for us.

It's a partial solution, but every VM is hosted on a host machine. If the host machine has a fault or a kernel failure, all your VMs go down at once either way. Live redundancies is the only way to truly avoid this issue, which requires separate bare metal servers, a load balancer or a docker/kubernetes build (which is what we use).
The Dealer.com one also sounds like a bad code deployment, so once again servers and VMs wouldn't stop that at all.
The solution for this is better QA process, which is incredibly complex when you have a product this widespread.
 
Ouch....I agree with Alex - you would think if they cared about their clients, they would spend some cheddar on security /backup option.

In all fairness to Dealer.com I don't think we should paint them as uncaring. Everyone makes mistakes. They probably have one of the largest investments in security and backup in this industry. The teams allocated to those areas are bigger than some of their competitors' entire organization!

When you get as big as them it is harder to cover up the amount of shit when it hits the fan.

I can forgive them for little outages that get fixed. I would even forgive them for their 6+ month SEO issue if they'd pick up the damn phone or get back on DealerRefresh and continue to address it. That is uncaring! And definitely not the Dealer.com I once worked for.
 
In all fairness to Dealer.com I don't think we should paint them as uncaring. Everyone makes mistakes. They probably have one of the largest investments in security and backup in this industry. The teams allocated to those areas are bigger than some of their competitors' entire organization!

When you get as big as them it is harder to cover up the amount of shit when it hits the fan.

I can forgive them for little outages that get fixed. I would even forgive them for their 6+ month SEO issue if they'd pick up the damn phone or get back on DealerRefresh and continue to address it. That is uncaring! And definitely not the Dealer.com I once worked for.

Well said! :thumbup:

It's a partial solution, but every VM is hosted on a host machine. If the host machine has a fault or a kernel failure, all your VMs go down at once either way. Live redundancies is the only way to truly avoid this issue, which requires separate bare metal servers, a load balancer or a docker/kubernetes build (which is what we use).
The Dealer.com one also sounds like a bad code deployment, so once again servers and VMs wouldn't stop that at all.
The solution for this is better QA process, which is incredibly complex when you have a product this widespread.

You are right Craig, an experienced QA Dept/process is going to be needed in any case. I'll look into this and talk to our developers since I am not 100% sure, but I believe our Infrastructure provider doesn't run all of our VMs on the same host...I know Docker has been mentioned a few times around here. Good to know others like yourself have gone this direction!

Has any info come out from DDC as to what actually caused the outage?
 
It's a partial solution, but every VM is hosted on a host machine. If the host machine has a fault or a kernel failure, all your VMs go down at once either way. Live redundancies is the only way to truly avoid this issue, which requires separate bare metal servers, a load balancer or a docker/kubernetes build (which is what we use).
The Dealer.com one also sounds like a bad code deployment, so once again servers and VMs wouldn't stop that at all.
The solution for this is better QA process, which is incredibly complex when you have a product this widespread.
Bingo, I've said it before, they're too big for their britches. Scaling becomes a problem.