Three days ago we received an expected notice from our long time data center that they were going dark on Sept 12th.
About one and a half hours ago, after three days of marathon work, I just cut over the unix.com to a new data center with a completely new OS and Ubuntu distribution.
Awesome Neo, you ROCK 
Thanks,
R. Singh
I agree with Ravinder!
Nice..
Well that's a lot of superb work. Supertechy!!
Great job, Neo - thank you - feels much faster now...
One thing I've noticed: doing Mark Forums read from the Quick Links , gets me here:
UNIX.COM Alert
Invalid Redirect URL (https://www.unix.com)
Tried force reloading the FF tab, logging out and logging back in - the same.
Hm... I cannot upload the image to the thread either....
It it more responsive now that a few days back.
Does it still make sense for you to be tied down to a private data center instead public cloud? I am curious.
I am not into VPS and clouds. We have tried them many times.
They are not reliable and perform poorly.
My experience is if you want reliability, spend the money and get a dedicated server in a well placed data center.
In my view "the cloud" is over-hyped, unreliable and very insecure.
Great job, Neo! Kudos for the smoothness of the transition.
Funny, i had just this discussion with a customer of mine: usually i work for banks and other large corporations with datacenters of several hundreds or thousands of (virtualised) servers. This time my customer is a relatively small company with about 50 servers (not virtualised by now) and the job is to transfer the whole datacenter to a new location (another town actually) and introduce virtualisation on the way.
Their first ideas when we had the kick-off work shop were the typical buzzword-bingo: cloud ... blabla ... software storage ... blabla ... Nutanics ... platform as a service ..., etc.
Then i asked a few questions: turns out, they have no idea what a "cloud" is and in fact what they really need is a reliable DevOps system. Their most prominent use case is: they need a test (development, ...) environment for one of their production servers and they want to more or less automatically deploy it. This is exactly what a DevOps system can help you with. My suggestion was to introduce Ansible but also reorganise their environment so that industrialisation and standardisation takes place. No more "hand-crafted one-of-a-kind" server systems but standardised machines with a standardised setup that is easily replicateable.
Next question: their most valuable asset is a large corporate database with a CRM system on top. Do you want to have that somewhere in the internet?
A: "Ah, but we can put a clause regarding this in the contract!"
Q: "Yes - and when this is breached (as has happened to some in the past) you get some refund but the trust of your customers to give you any data is NIL, never to return again and your business model is therefore dead. How much refund do you need to cover for that?"
Cloud services are nice when you need systems for testing for a limited amount of time and you don't want to hold the hardware resources for this. If you need a system to test your new database with meaningless test data then Amazon cloud, Microsoft Azure or whatever else you prefer is for you. If you need a reliable productive system you better have control over every clock cycle the underlying machine offers.
bakunin
It is all about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. (CI/CD) If a customer does not see value on it, it might not be able to appreciate what the Cloud does bring, in general, whether a private one or a public one. Personally, I like engineering private cloud using as the base OpenStack and I have even done it using VMWare with VRA and VRO but ultimately the customer must understand the benefit of Infrastructure as Code and the safety that it produces by building confidence with testing and reproducible results.
These are marking buzzwords, not engineering principles:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. (CI/CD)
Here is the problem.
Your post (on this topic, not generally) is one sided. This is normal and often seen when people have "drank the koolaid" and "believe in something" and develop a confirmation bias toward it. This is a fact of life - bias toward things we "believe in".
All good engineers (especially formally trained engineers) know from formal training and experience that every system has engineering trade-offs and it holds true, in general, that when you gain something in a system, you lose something else.
This is a universal truth.
So, all technologies, all systems, have good and bad, costs, benefits, negative and unforeseen consequences. This in an core universal constant. You cannot gain something without losing something.
Sorry to be so blunt, but when anyone, regardless of who they are or how smart or experienced they may be, make sweeping statements about now great something is without at the same time, making statements of the potential downsides - this demonstrates bias, not system engineering expertise or considered analysis.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. (CI/CD)
These are meaningless marking buzzwords designed by the marketing department of companies meant to sell and convince others to spend money.
I have a lot of experience in data centers (decades), and this means a lot of experience with both stand alone servers and cloud services.
While "cloud services" offer numerous benefits, they really do not offer the buzzwords above. To me, those buzzwords are more Orwellian than fact.
For example, if you have an application in a cloud with a lot of legacy code, and the cloud provider upgrades (which they do continuously as the buzzwords suggest) and your legacy code is not upwardly compatible with the upgrade of the service provider, you, the application owner, now have a problem which is driven by the cloud service provider, not by your own requirements, budget and timeline, etc.
This means that none of these buzzwords hold true in one simple test case, in practical terms when a cloud service makes changes to their infrastructure which is at odds with the customers legacy apps:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. (CI/CD)
In this case, these should be:
Continuous Upgrade Issues and Continuous Dependency and Continuous Trouble.
I can easily go on and on with experienced and well considered engineering trade-off examples and practical situational analysis to show that "cloud" technology has good and bad, value and devalue, and the cost-benefits are situational dependent.
If anyone does not understand this, and does not realize that all systems have positives and negative engineering trades, and tend to present one-sided arguments toward any system or technology, then that person is not yet a true engineer (in the core spirit of what an engineer is), but more of a "believer" or "follower". Engineers, especially system engineers, are not "believers" they are analysts who can see both sides of a system. System engineering know that every system is like the ying and yang system, with good and bad, and they think it looks foolish to espouse the positive without also pointing out the trade-offs.
On my desktop, for example, I have a 12 core Mac Pro. It's a great system (fast, strong, reliable, plenty of head room for all my apps and development IDEs to run); but this round black can puts out so much heat, my electricity bill has gone up. I need more cooling in the room because of it. So, I have to make a decision. Is the increased cost of electricity and heat generated at my desk worth the extra performance I get with 12 cores and 64G of RAM at my desktop? It's a trade-off.
So, now I automatically shut down this 12 core beast every night to reduce heat, which I never had to do with my little Mac Book Air!
Everything is a trade-off. Everything!
Marketeers, salespeople, and "followers" ("believers") tend to always only hype the positives, and hide the trade-offs. This is their job. Many people buy into the hype. Millions of people go out and make a living every day selling ideas. This is a core part of the economy, and without it, there would be less economy (another trade-off - hype does tend to make money and generate business).
This statement:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. (CI/CD)
Is pure "drink the koolaid" marketing buzz, and has nothing to do with sound system engineering analysis or trade-off analysis.
When folks reply to me, especially on broad concepts like this, please present both sides and not a one-sided "I am a believer" reply, because "believing" is really a kind illusion, at least in my viewpoint. Whenever we start to "believe" we start to lose objectivity.
Everything in this world is a trade-off, and everything has good and bad bundled together.
And if I can be so bold to say, it is these "strong beliefs" that people hold dear and near to their heart, which cause a great majority of the worlds problems.
I think I made my point and better stop now because I really go off the rails and start ranting against the current hype around AI !!
Yes, that is certainly a good case for cloud services.
I also use cloud services for the same, but on a limited basis.
We used to run UNIX.COM in the cloud many years ago, but it was just a PITA compared to a top end dedicated box.
If we were not so "old and long in the tooth" here at UNIX.COM and did not have so much legacy PHP code, I might consider the cloud again, but we have far too much legacy code for cloud services.
That feeling when everything is moved and working ...
Great job 
As for the subtopic...
Regards
Peasant
Sorry, Neo, if I struck a nerve there, but I never said that CI/CD are engineering principles. I said that the Cloud is appreciated by those customers that implements CI/CD as part of their developing and delivering/deployment strategy. You had a lot to say and seems to have a strong opinion that anything opposite to your logic is "one sided". I do not have anything else to say.
Actually, I became disillusioned about hype nearly, 15 years ago, so paint me guilty.
I understand, especially in the western world (US certainly) that marketing hype drives the economy, especially the tech economy, and this "hype-economy", creates trillions of dollars in wealth globally, not to mention jobs and opportunities.
There is nothing fundamentally "good or bad" with the "hype-economy" because like all systems, there is "good and bad".
As the old saying goes:
This is so true, haha.
Folks love to bite the hook just like fish, that shiny, silvery or gold bait flickering in the water... so appealing...
Then BOOM!
You are hooked.
You did not "strike a nerve with me" ... I did not reply with emotion.
AND,
Basic engineering principles are not "strong opinion".
They are facts.
There is no doubt (in my mind at least) that the terms you highlighted in bold, quoting you exactly:
That is simply "marketing buzzword hype" ... it's not my opinion.
That phrase paints a picture which is meant by marketing people to sell a technology service based on a one-sided promise. That obvious to the casual observer.
Just because I do not agree with your post, does not mean it "hit a nerve".. but it is my responsibility to reply to something posted here which is hype and not factual "system engineering".
I'm a formally trained system engineering guy with 40 years of system engineering experience, all in UNIX and Linux related IT networking and computing, since before the Internet until now, still coding and administering systems, because I love it, not because I have to do it for a living.
Some people actually think all these decades of hands-on experience has a lot of value 
If you don't think my reply has value, then sorry about that.
15 years ago, i had a blonde microphone hair and could not have cared less about computing.
Now i'm bald and care 
How i envy you forum behemoths, being there from the start.
Where did it all go wrong....
Well i'll tell you (i do love philosophical discussions)
It went wrong when marketing become blunt lying.
When sales became unrealistic.
When folks started studying something cause of hype not of interest/talent.
Above cause dramatic quality drop, due to hyperproduction of code and components.
Everything needs to be done now - less error handling, run faster - security often comes last (spectre, meltdown, bad coding practice).
Just reading the press :
BA lost 400k of user credentials due to hacking
Airports unable to check in passengers due to software bugs
BSOD on aircraft carriers 
21st Gatwick airport problems :
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/A8FB/production/\_103095234\_gatwick_edmundvonderburg.jpg
I mean, does it get any more mission critical then that :rolleyes:
Regards
Peasant.
In the early days of UNIX.COM over a decade ago, we had a lot more of these high level abstract, teaching discussions.
From my count, we are one of the oldest, if not THE oldest, "original tech forum" still standing and running.
We have some core folks here with the combined experience of many hundreds of years experience in IT; not only me.
Some are not active now, some come and go; even me over the years, I have been busy on other projects, some lasting years, and not as active as now.
But, we at UNIX.COM are still adding great value with a huge database of knowledge and factual information and solutions to real-world problems.
Thanks to everyone to have contributed over the years and who contribute now.
If I had of not been sided tracked with scuba diving and traveling the world for five years, and other projects (like cyberspace situational awareness), UNIX.COM would be much more popular (busy with more active users) as I could have kept the forums more current with new features.
But we will always strive to be "low noise" and "high signal" at UNIX.COM.
I think we have one of the highest "signal to noise" ratios on the planet with regard to information facts and technology.
Plus, I am the first to admit, I tend to go to YouTube for tutorials and knowledge these days and spend little time in any forum, except this one.
I would like to repeat that it is all about CI/CD ( I do not have to highlight it since I made myself clear before). Companies (customers) that do not implement CI/CD for the most part do not appreciate the evolution to the Cloud. Thanks to Cloud computing and the implementation of automation the speed of developing and delivering time for applications is faster. I enjoy engineering systems that almost do not require manual intervention from the moment that we commit code to source control.
I have enjoyed seeing teams confidence raise by the nature of CI, knowing that tests are well crafted, and real to what it will show in production. That a whole piece of infrastructure is created at demand, automatically for CI and once that the fast feedback is reported, it is brought down until the next test, which it could be some few minutes later. This is not a buzzword, it is real results that benefits organizations that wants faster deployments without compromising quality assurance and I have the fortune to work doing that. There is pride in me when I know I have engineered a system that provides reproducible results and that has been committed to source control and that can be brought to life in several minutes.
In fact, with the utilization of containers now I can even provide quicker infrastructure where immutability is possible.
It is not my intention to convince anyone (I am not in that business) but I want to reintegrate my original statement.
That's all great, and well written, but it has little to do with UNIX.COM moving our legacy server over to a new data center and upgrading.
If I moved it to the cloud, I would consider that a downgrade, not an upgrade, LOL
We have been on the cloud before... it's not an upgrade for UNIX.COM and our server.
Moving UNIX.COM to "the cloud" would be a downgrade, at least based on my experience.
And in closing moving to the cloud would not provide UNIX.COM:
This I know as a fact from years of experience.
Cheers.