As a perfect example of process-oriented approach to IT, every once in awhile, someone deep in the bowels of the machine presses a button in Azure, and a script gets fired off to rifle through every resource in the cloud, and fix what it thinks are problems. On the one hand, I think that’s a great idea to identify things that may have been left around and forgotten about. On the other hand, I think having it do anything automatically is a terrible idea. It should only flag things, for review.
I’ve gotten a couple of emails from an internal portal, instructing me to “scale” two of my virtual machines to different sizes. The first suggestion is to “scale” to a slightly more-expensive size, the second to a teeny-tiny less expensive one. The first recommendation has slightly-faster I/O, and I can’t tell any difference in the second one’s specs. So… why? Why change either one? It’s a net cost increase. Why run this, and issue tickets to do this work, without having any sort of review about the proposed action relative to the purpose and functioning of those resources, and their costs?
Between drafting this and posting it, those tickets got deleted. They were replaced by other tickets that told me to scale my VM’s to competing SKU’s. And then those tickets got deleted.
It’s almost funny. The machines that are popping up — and then disappearing — from this automated insanity are being unused at the moment. So, yes! They should be scaled. Except that they’re being unused because the thing they did got completely broken by changes in another group. Changes which are taking many months to get sorted. Changes that are spawning other months-long processes with other groups to get sorted.
It occurs to me that I should just spin them down while I wait, but they’re a rounding error on my own cloud tab, let alone the overall spend on Azure at the corporate level. None of this effort about these machines makes any sense. They cost less per month than me taking a dump on the company dime. If we’re going to automate all the things, and issue tickets to perform cost-savings measures without review, then at least put an “if” statement in the script such that it only operates on things that cost more than a box of pencils at the office.