What is our primary use case?
We are part of the State Department and use the solution to achieve operational excellence and readiness for the cloud. We think about what the next 20 to 30 years of consular systems infrastructure might look like to build and design for the next 40 years. Not many other companies think beyond a decade.
The solution was implemented in our environment in 2014. The initial mission is still the same but how we go about it is different. For now, the solution is more for application support and making sure we are following State mandates or executive orders.
For example, one use case involved planning, designing the implementation, and executing a launch of online passport renewals.
Our environment is moving toward tools that provide automation to remove human error. These are tactical operations and use cases. We currently use SaaS, OpenShift, and Ansible to a limited degree.
How has it helped my organization?
We had many issues with staff turnover during COVID. Working from home and trying to maintain databases was not ideal. During this time, the solution would have been rated a five out of ten.
Sometimes, vendors provide the government or bigger organizations with band-aids but not solutions. Everything seems to be a problem so many fixes are provided. A fix for this or a fix for that is equivalent to putting a band-aid on a large cut which will not work. Vendors tend to look at the money game because larger companies are their bread and butter. There should be an appreciation for the needs of bigger organizations.
It took some time to get us in a good position with the solution. There is definitely some growth and appreciation. We are at a place now where we can grow our environment. Today, the solution is rated a seven out of ten.
What is most valuable?
The solution is useful for application support and automations.
What needs improvement?
A completely new setup should not be required when upgrading to a new version of the solution. For example, moving from RHEL 7.7 to RHEL 9 requires us to go through every minor version upgrade as well as RHEL 8. We do not have the ability to patch as quickly as we would like, but there are pathways. We got on 6.8 this year and migrated to 6.11 where we are trying to work on the automation portions of deployment. Before, we had variations of versions 7.2, 7.3, and 7.5 in our environment. We have not yet been able to use the supported versions that we are accustomed to with our applications. We are now on 7.9.1 and are trying to implement the minor upgrade versions in our environment. We have not yet experienced a healthy environment or the joy of using RHEL because we keep encountering issues and problems.
There are issues when upgrading or integrating with previous applications or systems such as Satellite, vRA, SaaS, or OpenShift. This is extremely, extremely important because a lot of our infrastructure is on RHEL. We need to have someone onsite to adjudicate our infrastructure's most important applications, when we would rather be able to patch them in a timely manner without having the whole world assist us.
The solution should be more user-friendly so we better understand how to scale. It is not that we shun professional services, but there is a major knowledge gap in our understanding of the solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
With anything, when you nurture it things work. Now that we are finally on 7.9 and migrated 6.11 we are actively trying to automate. This puts us in a better and more stable position.
How are customer service and support?
We rely primarily on our contracting staff or professional services for support. We receive onsite support from account engineers who apply critical patches or troubleshoot code that is not cohesive. For the most part, turnaround time is moderate but certain legacy applications are harder to troubleshoot, so they take more time.
Technical support steps in for big issues and provides good help. For example, support assisted with decommissioning 6.2 and 6.5 because they were at end of life with no option for purchasing ongoing support. We had professional services and many different products, so technical support made an exception to help with migrations and that was appreciated.
Technical support is rated a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
I do not know the setup details. The solution was implemented in 2014 and I joined the team in 2018.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We are currently experiencing issues when upgrading or integrating with previous applications and are looking for solutions. We push out patches and look at Tower. We already tried Puppet and it integrates with Satellite, but we prefer to use home-grown products.
Because we use Satellite, it would be nice if the automation portions come from Tower or others. We have explained this to an account manager but solutions are being presented to us from a sales perspective. For example, we are told that we should ramp up, get other applications, or purchase more licenses.
Decommissioning is one of our biggest issues. We upgrade and spin it up, but then have problems decommissioning some applications so more user licenses are required. For example, we have an unused server but cannot remove the license because we are either unable to get assistance or do not know how to perform the action.
We used vRA with the solution but it did not work for us.
We also used CloudForm but are attempting without success to decommission because it was not a useful case.
What other advice do I have?
It is important to ensure there is a level of training for implementation. You need to understand compliance for your organization to determine whether vendors can provide appropriate tools.
Do not be afraid to ask questions once the solution is implemented in your environment to ensure you are where you need to be.
Stay on top of version or patch releases to prevent bugs or security vulnerabilities to your ISSO or agency.
I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.