[aphyr]

Hahaha I suppose that's an entirely legitimate question, isn't it? Just to reassure you, Lisa, yes, this is me, and I'm the only person who works at Jepsen. I'm still exploring voices for the Jepsen brand--since at some point I might hire more researchers, more recent stuff is written with an organizational "we". Suppose I should start adding bylines. :)

[agacera]

hey, Kile. Thanks for the awesome work you do.

completely off-topic: have you ever thought about giving your training (https://jepsen.io/training) in an online way (mooc, udemy, whatever)? I would love to learn about distributed systems from you, but today I think it would be almost impossible since you only seems to give in organization trainings.

[aphyr]

Thank you. Unfortunately, it's just not a good fit for a MOOC, in terms of class format and cost.

[eropple]

FWIW I think you're right to take this approach--most in-depth technical classes aren't good fits, for that matter, from a pricing perspective if nothing else. I charge a few hundred dollars a head to teach somebody in-person. The Fundamentals of Cloud Architecture course that I typically do is one I could, for the most part, extend to an online course...but, given that it includes the ability to contact me, etc., I wouldn't want to charge less than $100 for it.

It's a good course; better, IMO, at what it teaches than equivalent Udemy courses. And I'm a pretty good teacher, I can be pretty engaging while talking about this stuff and it's fun. But at the race-to-the-bottom prices of the MOOC economy, it's a nonstarter. The Udemy "every class is ten bucks" disease discourages really capable, competent people from sharing what they know.

(And Packt et al. finding somebody to read some slides is not a good counterexample. I said "really capable, competent" for a reason. I was approached by one of their competitors--a bigger company than they are--to write a book on Mesos on the back of two blog posts...)

[eternalban]

Have you explored high level consulting in inception phase of distributed system design? (and p.s. thank you for your exceptional work and knowledge sharing.)

[aphyr]

You're welcome, and yes, I do design consulting as well: https://jepsen.io/services.

[VectorLock]

This kind of answers the question I was wondering of "Who is 'Jepsen' and where are they getting funded from" at least partially.

[aphyr]

Oh yeah, I guess this is a startup website isn't it! And Jepsen is... sort of... a startup?

For context, Jepsen started as a series of volunteer nights-and-weekends blog posts and conference talks. About three years in I bootstrapped the business as a consultancy, with one client lined up and ~15K USD in [available] savings. Scraped through the first year by dipping into credit cards, learned a lot about pricing and pipelines, and am doing pretty well now. Having money in the bank lets me do more volunteer work, like this analysis. :)

Jepsen makes money through consulting services (usually paid analysis work), training classes, speaking engagements (I charge at for-profit orgs and speak for free at nonprofit events), and Amazon Marketplace subscriptions.

[rat87]

Kyle Kingsbury from NRST?