[jwildeboer]

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

[draga79]

Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set.

Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.

[viraptor]

It's still something that's weird to do without notifying the customers. What if things were slower? What if bsd introduced some slight change in behaviour that messed up their data but they didn't know when/why things changed? Full control doesn't mean unexpected YOLO changes are welcome.

[draga79]

As specified in several parts, the tests were conducted while maintaining and using BSD-based infrastructures for over 20 years. In some cases, Linux was used for various reasons (commercial, ideological, because they were inherited infrastructures managed by others, etc.), but the results were anticipated. I did not expect a performance degradation, and in any case, having set up the systems in a mirrored environment, there was always the possibility to revert in a few minutes.

[viraptor]

Maybe it was all done properly. I hope so. But the post really doesn't show that which I guess is what a few people here notice. You can't say you tested something for today for over 20 years. Things change - if it wasn't tested for that specific migration for that specific customer, then it wasn't really tested. I see people doing yolo changes that way and thought it's worth mentioning explicitly.

[blueflow]

If it is infrastructure that is critical to your company, you do not want your hoster to run experiments on it.

Its also a legal nightmare for the hoster if something goes wrong.

[blenderob]

> Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

How do people on the Internet come to such random conclusions when there is no way you could have known the full terms of the contract between the author and their client?

[Neil44]

Abusing trust is a bit strong, customers pay for a service and beyond a certain level of abstraction these obscure technical details (from their perspective) are not their concern. They're paying to have that abstracted.

[rcbdev]

> Abusing the trust of your customers

Yes. I also always let my customers sign off when I change the libraries I use. Completely sane approach.

[bigfatkitten]

How is it an abuse? As long as the customer continues to receive the service they paid for, who cares?

The major providers such as GCP, AWS etc share very few details about their underlying infrastructure with their customers. They change all sorts of things all the time.

[lazyant]

I wouldn't call it abuse of trust but it's a bad idea to do a migration or any operation that can fail and cause downtime without warning the clients. Come Monday and no servers are online, what do you say, "oops, I tried to change something that didn't work"? that is fine only if they knew there was a migration over the weekend. On my end this situation would fireable offense or close to it.

[appendix-rock]

What!? Changing implementation details is not “abusing trust”. Where would you even draw the line with this attitude!? Should I be informing my customers whenever I update the version of left-pad I have installed!?

[draga79]

They're paying for a service. For example, if their Nextcloud is working and is stable, they don't care if it's running on Linux, FreeBSD, OmniOS, etc. It's in the contract we have - and they're fine with it.

[Vegenoid]

It’s generally about the probability of issues occurring and the expected magnitude of those potential issues. For most people and setups, moving the infrastructure to a new operating system would score about as highly as possible in both of those metrics.

As has been said, it varies case-by-case, and the OP believes they have a relationship with their client such that they didn’t need to provide notice for this, and they’re probably right. But most people doing this would send out a “maintenance is occurring on this date and some downtime may occur” email.