I apologize if you came to this site and it was slow.
I just upgraded the VM that runs this site to address the problem. I am hopeful there will be fewer problems now.
It appears that the old VM was memory-bound or near-memory-bound a lot of the time. This was likely leading to the CPU problems because of paging.
Now the VM has room to breathe on the memory side and I believe that will resolve the problem. I have no proof that memory was the actual problem, only a correlation between slow times, higher memory usage, and CPU spikes. Time will tell if this resolves the issue.
In the meantime, paying a few more bucks to see if things get better seemed like the right thing to do.
I have heard from some parties that the cloud technology offerings that are gaining traction now (Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) are going to bring about the "death of IT".
First of all this is a big overstatement. Next, I also think these technologies are actually going to be net job creators, and not just for developers.
This is true because more small companies can afford to build-out infrastructure and therefore we will have more technology startups, which will create more jobs.
I also think that existing IT jobs likely aren't going anywhere either. These environments (Azure, Google Cloud, AWS) are complicated and it takes a good IT professional to learn them, set them up correctly, and manage them. There is a lot to learn here, so A) people need to go learn it and B) smart people need to be in charge of managing it in the long run.
And, interestingly where there were basically two flavors of IT in the past (Windows and Linux) now you have 3 - Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Even though Amazon and Google are based largely on Linux, the two service offerings are not the same thing. They have different services, different UI, different structures. To be an expert in one is not to be an expert in the other.
To me this is nothing but good news from a competitive standpoint (3 options vs. 2 options) but also from a job creation and economic perspective.
The other good news? Since these platforms actually run VMs in a lot of cases, your existing IT expertise will still be applicable as well.
Virtualization probably has had a negative effect on jobs thus far, but the next stage will almost certainly create jobs, and opportunity, for those willing to learn and pick up new skills.
Jonathan Fries on .