Website Thread. 8/11/09

[Bo Gercke 845743]

So would you say then that VATUSA should provide an alternative for ARTCCs who do not wish to incur the expense or time involved in maintaining a website?

 

I want to try and hone in on this specific point and get some real dialog on this to understand what your specific suggestion would be for this part.....

 

It's not just a time and money issue. It's a manpower issue, and as Luke alluded to, there simply aren't the people available to pick up the pieces and put the website back together when an outgoing ATM walks out the door.

 

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about design, infrastructure, or data storage. I'll give a few ideas, and we can start there. Website uniformity would allow us to reduce the amount of manpower required to maintain the system. Whether it's one, or 22 different websites, all the sites would have the same look, and user functionality on the front side. Identify the most essential components in an ARTCC's website, and duplicate those components in the layout throughout the 22 ARTCC's and streamline the process.

 

Would it be possible to create a single website that incorporates all 22 ARTCC's under it? Would it be easiest to make things all uniform and of the same design so that when changes are made, they affect the whole, rather than the part? I am [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming the ARTCC websites include CSS. Why not bring the individual site together in one place and move the CSS 'up a level'? Then when changes are made in one place they trickle out to each of the subsequent areas. In instances where individual ARTCC's need to update single items in their particular ARTCC section with added files, or updated policy, wouldn't it be easier to have user groups identified and controlled access on a per group basis? A super admin or a few super admins would need to be responsible for administering logins and [Mod - Happy Thoughts]igning the groups along with rights.

 

Would using a cloud as a central repository for all data, docs, images, or anything non-infrastructure related help to combat the removal of entire websites, and their [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ociated data? Clouds can be mirrored repeatedly to keep sections of information from being lost/down. In conjunction with this it is imperative that the website is backed-up on a regular basis (once a week maybe). If a back-up is completed once a week and continues to over-write the previous week the potential of data lost is only 6 days. If there were no updates or changes made during this time then there will be no loss of data. Is this not an option?

[Bo Gercke 845743]

So would you say then that VATUSA should provide an alternative for ARTCCs who do not wish to incur the expense or time involved in maintaining a website? I want to try and hone in on this specific point and get some real dialog on this to understand what your specific suggestion would be for this part.....

 

At one point, I made a proposal that VATSIM shouldn't have Divisional or Regional web sites, either.

 

But to answer your question, yes. I see the ARTCC web sites as providing a diversion and dilution of effort, preventing a common branding, having multiple attack vectors and all of this outweighs any advantage that you may get from allowing each ARTCC to experiment. If I were in your shoes, I'd solicit feedback from the ARTCC staffs as to the features they find most effective, then implement them on the VATUSA site so that each ARTCC has access to them, even if they don't have a webmaster on staff. You then have a single web site to secure and back up, single source control repository for files, common branding, etc.

 

Early on in our existence, some of our staff tried to set up individual web sites for the different equipment programs. The problem with this was that each would look different, have different features and capabilities, and we had no way of enforcing common standards or continuity between staff members. It became easier in the long run, believe it or not, for me to incorporate suggestions from the individual staff members and enable a feature for all programs than it was to have a hodge-podge of different sites. I think you'll find the same.

 

How different are the sites between ARTCCs, excluding look and feel? If an ARTCC has competent sysadmins and/or development staff, couldn't you put them to productive use creating and maintaining features for all of VATUSA?

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Andrew Podner 994055]

Here's my take on this,

 

I personally have no problem with an ARTCC that chooses to develop a website. If they choose to incur the cost and the burden of development and maintenance, then that is their prerogative. All essential data is housed by VATUSA/VATSIM anyway with a few limited exceptions, depending on your definition of essential.

 

One thing that this thread had put on my mind is that a de-facto requirement may exist for an ARTCC to maintain a website by virtue of not offering an alternative. Now that is something that does make me a bit uncomfortable because it is not fair to ARTCCs that have neither the time nor inclination to develop the infrastructure.

 

So, this has begun a discussion amongst a few of us as to what an appropriate baseline site would entail, based on previous experiences as ATMs, TAs etc.

 

For Instance, VATUSA from my viewpoint would have no interest in supporting the infrastructure for the ZLA pilot training system, which may never have been born had we put a system in place forbidding ARTCCs to have their own site. The ZLA program has been a great success and I think reflects an example of why ARTCC websites are a good thing.

 

So there are 2 sides to this as I see it. And I think that reasonable compromise to to offer an either/or scenario. We have already started down this road by providing XML feeds to the ARTCCs to reduce the need for them to maintain events, rosters, etc. Certainly, I am willing to extend that up a notch and provide the alternative for a USA subsite that covers the basics, but at this point, I do not think it would be appropriate to undo all of the work that these guys have put into what they've done.

 

I also share the belief that at minimum, USA should retain copy of each sector file, POF, and SOP. But as far as mirroring and all of that goes, I'd love to do it, but it doesn't come for free and we have to work with what resources we have available to us.

[Luke Kolin]

I personally have no problem with an ARTCC that chooses to develop a website. If they choose to incur the cost and the burden of development and maintenance, then that is their prerogative. All essential data is housed by VATUSA/VATSIM anyway with a few limited exceptions, depending on your definition of essential.

 

I think VATSIM has done poorly over the years in terms of strategic thinking in the realm of IT. The day-to-day technology has been OK at best, but there really hasn't been much effort put into looking at an overall IT strategy and what services should be provided at what level, continuity planning and creating a developer/contributor ecosystem.

 

You're starting down that road. Determining the "right" level of decentralization within VATUSA isn't an easy task, because as you point out on one hand some ARTCCs are quite capable of doing things in-house and we don't want to preclude something like the ZLA Pilot Certs. On the other hand, VATUSA has a responsibility to provide consistent services, branding and IT continuity between facilities. It's up to you to decide.

 

Personally, I'd leave VATUSA hosting and providing core functionality, and if a facility wants to experiment a bit I'd give them room outside those core areas to muck about, with the proviso that if it became a roaring success and replicated across multiple facilities VATUSA would be likely to pull it back in-house. That seems threatening to some but my hope would be that the creators would see that instead as an opportunity to replicate their success on a wider stage.

 

What really makes the decision for me at least is what I mentioned in my earlier thread. How many good content creators and sysadmins are there in the VATUSA facilities? You don't have 23. Maybe you have four or five. I'd rather try and get them all working together on a single, larger project rather than duplicating each other's efforts on a much smaller scale. I'd die to have three competent developers working with me. Give me the right three people and 180 days, and we could rewrite VATSIM from scratch. And the technology wouldn't suck.

 

So, this has begun a discussion amongst a few of us as to what an appropriate baseline site would entail, based on previous experiences as ATMs, TAs etc.

 

My caution here would be to not restrict yourself to ARTCC staff, and this is something that applies equally to Alex and the rest of the VATUSA staff. It's often easy to lose sight of the fact that the largest single group of VATUSA members is pilots, not controllers. Clearly controllers provide the majority of the user base for the facility sites, but don't lose sight of what you can do for pilots, virtual airlines and v.mils. They're part of the ecosystem too, and you can make their lives easier and by doing so [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ist your controllers and facility staffs.

 

Certainly, I am willing to extend that up a notch and provide the alternative for a USA subsite that covers the basics, but at this point, I do not think it would be appropriate to undo all of the work that these guys have put into what they've done.

 

My earlier question stands - just how much do you feel you will be "undoing"? The majority of ARTCC sites as I see them have a forum (just how many forums does VATUSA really need?), downloads of charts and sector files, contact info for the staff and maybe a "who is online" DIV. ZLA is an obvious exception, but again I come back to wishing that instead of just doing work for ZLA, if VATUSA could get Gary to do work for several ARTCCs at once we'd overall be much better.

 

I also share the belief that at minimum, USA should retain copy of each sector file, POF, and SOP. But as far as mirroring and all of that goes, I'd love to do it, but it doesn't come for free and we have to work with what resources we have available to us.

 

I don't think that mirroring or disaster recovery is as much work or expense as people make it out to be. The hard part is simply writing the scripts to dump the databases or source control repositories; once you've done that it's just a matter of rsync'ing them across the network on a scheduled basis to a remote server. After that, the most work is remembering to validate your backups from time to time.

 

VATSIM has a tremendous advantage in that there are groups all over the place who can cooperate. It might be a good idea to touch base with your opposite numbers in Canada, Europe and elsewhere to see if you can work out some sort of arrangement where you trade 1 or 2 gigabytes of storage space on their servers for you to host a backup, in return for providing the same service to them. You can use each other as DNS slave servers for redundancy, as well as using VATSIM itself. Disk space and bandwidth, contrary to protestations I regularly hear here, is dirt cheap. We shouldn't waste it, but regular online backups aren't a waste - they're a cost of doing business.

 

http://www.deltava.org/bwd/

 

These are our bandwidth stats. The blue is HTTP traffic, and the yellow is SSH. 99% of that is online backups. And I probably do them a little too often (and I'm scaling back) but I get 1.5TB of bandwidth each month; and even with my backups I might use 300GB of it. And I have a fair bit data - you probably don't. Heck, in the worst case I'll give you space - just encrypt whatever data you send over. The point is that within the VATSIM ecosystem there's plenty of online backup space to be found if you're willing to barter a bit.

 

Congrats, by the way, on seeking to create a sustainable system that will survive your departure. I think that's how IT management needs to think and act, and if you're going to be a "Data Services Manager" (wth is that?) you should act the part. Good luck.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Andrew Podner 994055]

Luke,

 

your points are well taken, and backups, dumps etc, are already in place, but that is not true replication or mirroring which most hosting plans don't allow unless you want to go to the expense of VPS or something like that, which is not in the cards. Regardless, I am still exploring ways to make those things happen I do this type of thing at work on a regular basis and one thing that I have learned about IT is that the issue is very rarely about the technology. I am not limiting the discussion with anyone, but the bottom line is that this subject affects the ARTCCs in a big way, and the ATMs deserve the courtesy of first crack at the issue. The VATUSA website was written with both pilots and controllers in mind. That's the reason we feed events via XML for consumption by any VA or whomever else. If a VA or group of pilots made a specific request for a web service, we would do our best to fill it, but no such request has been made, so it is difficult for us to make [Mod - Happy Thoughts]umptions about what to provide.

 

Now, what feedback I have gotten from VAs and pilots is, 'we want to know whose having an event and where'. Ok, no problem. That was the genesis of the XML, RSS and Twitter services for events. So I do not feel that we have ignored that part of our customer base in any way. But the bottom line is that ARTCCs and Controllers are the largest consumers of data services and we have to meet those needs. Pilots don't currently need the promotions, training certs, testing, etc that controllers need and accordingly our infrastructure is heavily weighted toward meeting those needs, but this is not because we don't care about pilots.

 

What we'd be undoing is pride and effort of people who have taken the time to build those ARTCC sites. Regardless of what one person may think of the quality of their efforts, the effort deserves respect and consideration. There are backend engines on nearly every ARTCC website for records management, certs, training, etc. Wikis loaded with training information. That is a huge undertaking for these guys, and I just could not support walking in and saying, 'ok guys, we own you so the jig is up, time to toe the line'. It's not the way I do business and it wouldn't be fair or considerate of their efforts.

 

I believe that my job exists to serve and support the membership of VATUSA and my most frequent customer block is ARTCC Staff to support their operations. What you see of our website is the result of input from the staff and an attempt to reduce overhead and admin time. My focus this last 2 months has been on developing a single integrated system, and though we are not fully there, we are getting a little closer each day. The public part of the site really only represents about 30% of what is there.

 

Clearly you have a lot of experience in this area, and I can appreciate that. From this side of things, we don't really function like a VA or even a corporation with a very direct top-down approach, the system is structured to give leaders at each level as much latitude as possible. The CoR is pretty clear about that.

 

I'll wrap this one up by saying that the offer has already been put on the table that if an ARTCC is tired of maintaining their website, we will provide an alternative. Once that infrastructure is in place, then ARTCCs maintaining a website are doing so by their own free will and that is not likely to change in the future. IF a disgruntled ATM packs it in and leaves, we will be able to provide a recovery package. That is the furthest extent to which I would go at this time. Policies change, etc, and a day may come where we are compelled to centralize it. Absent that happening, I just do not see and at this juncture would not support a forced centralization.

 

Thanks for your input, I think I have provide all the info I can on this one.

[Luke Kolin]

your points are well taken, and backups, dumps etc, are already in place, but that is not true replication or mirroring which most hosting plans don't allow unless you want to go to the expense of VPS or something like that, which is not in the cards.

 

A VPS isn't exactly extravagant these days - I did a quick Google search for VPS hosting and it's not hard to find stuff available in the $25-$35/month range. Heck, dedicated servers start in the $70/month range depending on the place. And I don't consider it unreasonable in a Division of several thousand people to put together a budget of $360 or so a year for IT infrastructure if you want to be credible at this. A VPS isn't exactly a high hurdle.

 

Regardless, I am still exploring ways to make those things happen I do this type of thing at work on a regular basis and one thing that I have learned about IT is that the issue is very rarely about the technology.

 

You're right - the technology exists to enable processes and capabilities. We've been very fortunate at Delta Virtual in that technology has allowed us to innovate and experiment with new policies, promotion schemes and extremely high staff/pilot ratios - strategic, yet secondary to the core mission of providing a great learning and flying experience. VATSIM is no different. Technology is not an end in itself, but fundamentally we are flying and controlling aircraft in an MMORPG environment (and supporting those who do) across the world. That is at its core an ambitious and demanding technological achievement, and to claim anything less is to lose track of the task at hand.

 

I am not limiting the discussion with anyone, but the bottom line is that this subject affects the ARTCCs in a big way, and the ATMs deserve the courtesy of first crack at the issue.

 

I would disagree with that on two fronts. First and most practically, the individual facilities have had the first crack at the issue for about seven or eight years now. And the second crack. The third crack. Maybe some are on their fourth kick at the can. If you believe that they need yet another try, fair enough. But at some point we need to draw a line and decide that perhaps another approach is warranted.

 

The second issue I have is that I wonder what we are asking of the ATMs. What do we want them to be? Do we want them to be generalists, or do we want them to focus on providing ATC services by encouraging new controllers and training those in their facility? That's a broad strategic question that is up to Alex, Alan, Michael, yourself and the VATUSA staff. I won't pretend to answer it, but I will say that unless you believe that technology (or overseeing technology) is part of their core brief, then the facilities don't need to host their own web sites.

 

Now, what feedback I have gotten from VAs and pilots is, 'we want to know whose having an event and where'. Ok, no problem. That was the genesis of the XML, RSS and Twitter services for events. So I do not feel that we have ignored that part of our customer base in any way.

 

I don't want to diverge away in this thread, but could you PM or e-mail me ([email protected]) with your XML event feed? My personal issue with the RSS/Twitter feeds is that they don't appear to have enough data for me to ingest directly into our database, and any data feed you expose needs to be auto-ingestible for us to make use of it. Let's take this offline.

 

What we'd be undoing is pride and effort of people who have taken the time to build those ARTCC sites. Regardless of what one person may think of the quality of their efforts, the effort deserves respect and consideration.

 

Let me be completely cold and heartless for a second. There are two types of ARTCC webmasters: one group, which won't be here in another three months because they get bored and move on. I really don't care about their feelings or pride. There's the second group, who are capable, determined and committed. And that group is wasted at the ARTCC level when we can't get a good web infrastructure at the VATUSA/VATSIM level, and I'd want to point them in a direction that can positively affect the largest number of people possible (which is unlikely to be at the facility level).

 

There are backend engines on nearly every ARTCC website for records management, certs, training, etc. Wikis loaded with training information.

 

Fantastic. Let's figure out a way of ensuring that the best of each can be implemented in a way that everyone can access it. Let's ensure that it meets common standards of data retention, accessibility, branding, etc. That can't be done at a facility level.

 

From this side of things, we don't really function like a VA or even a corporation with a very direct top-down approach, the system is structured to give leaders at each level as much latitude as possible. The CoR is pretty clear about that.

 

I wouldn't interpret the CoR in such a fashion. But I don't think that the CoR mandates the current web structure, and I don't believe that VATUSA or VATSIM is dramatically different from a VA, which isn't dramatically different from any other organization, non-profit or for-profit. I was struck when I wrote the first DVA site how similar it was to workflow systems I wrote for a living in a prior job. They're only as different as we want them to be.

 

I'll go back to what I told Alex in my first post here - do you believe that the fundamental issue with VATUSA over the years has been the people, or the process and the structure? If you want to keep doing things the same way as they've always been, that's your choice. You and Alex are part of the VATUSA staff, and you've been given the ability to decide the strategic direction of the Division. I'll just point out that there have been several individuals in your roles before using the same structure and policies, and the results have been sufficiently consistent to suggest that different people aren't likely to produce a different result. You may prove that [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ertion wrong - how confident are you that you can make it work where others have not?

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Andrew Podner 994055]

As I stated previously, I really don't have anything left to post with regards my opinions or outlook for this thread. I understand your concerns with the way things are run, but as I have said before, we are not having widespread problems with ARTCC websites. This conversation has influenced and impacted our operational plan to provide alternative web services to ARTCCs at their option in the near future.

 

In any event, here's the OP in our forums announcing the Events feed

 

http://forum.vatusa.us/index.php?showtopic=1110

[Gerry Hattendorf 935415]

Interesting read, my opinion as the webmaster for ZLA is that Andrew has things well in hand. In the VATUSA IT forum he has asked other webmasters for similar ideas, but the idea of everyone having a generic "template" is never really been discussed. Personally I think that would require an enormous amount of coordination between VATUSA and the individual ARTCC's to make that happen.

 

Having some generic XML might help others to obtain information, but as there are no established standards for platforms or protocols to be used, with the exception of code sharing there is no coding "style" required, which is fine by me.

 

I might write my scripts in php by hand, and creating my database to meet the requirements for the ZLA senior staff, yet another ARTCC might use a completely different approach for data storage, and page delivery. Looking at Luke's work, he is no doubt a skilled engineer, however there are other websites that have been created by very creative people that might not be professional programmers, or choose to use a very simple web hosting solution. Personally I kind of like the diversity that makes this hobby fun and exciting. Telling someone that you can only use certain platforms, coding languages, or data storage would certainly scare many members from accepting the voluntary duties of such a position IMO.

 

Cheers!