In my opinion, one of the best parts of working at a small company is the lack of bloat and IT is one area where this advantage is especially notable. This post provides a brief overview of how we are setup to be productive. Focus here is on “IT” and not our product cluster – perhaps another post later for that.
Servers
We are all Linux (Arch Linux specifically) here except for one forlorn Windows server that is only present because the awful BlackBerry Server software cannot run on anything else.
In terms of roles our strongest bunch of machines is colocated in Atlanta and serves up our Wildfire Platform product. In addition to that we have the following at the office:
- A QA environment where we stage new releases that consists of a couple machines and an older, used load balancer. Though this environment is puny compared to production we try to keep similar moving pieces and complications involved to limit surprises during a production push.
- Our corporate email server. We run Zimbra and I love it compared to the early years when we were running Exchange 2003.
- A mix of boxes providing file shares, backups, Subversion, Hudson, JIRA, monitoring visualization, a staging environment for the creative folks, and a couple other things.
Though Arch Linux does not have commercial backing and support it has proven to be a very good choice if for no other reason than its rolling release schedule that makes updates effortless and repositories current long term. Thankfully Sean was very vocal about using it when he joined us.
We use Zabbix to monitor everything in production and at the office with a couple of separate health check scripts on both ends in the case that one side went completely down. We also backup everything and use Amazon S3 as our “offsite” location.
Work Stations
This place used to be mostly Windows and partly Linux. It was that way really for the first couple years. Slowly though, Mac OSX has completely taken over.
Off the top of my head it breaks down like this:
- 2 White Macbooks.
- 7 Macbook Pros (one running Arch Linux instead of OSX).
- 1 iMac.
- 1 Thinkpad running Arch Linux.
- 1 Windows Vista desktop that no one uses except for occasional IE/Outlook testing.
All the old Windows desktop work stations are now running Linux and filling some of the server roles mentioned above. We use Parallels images for most of our IE testing.
As the person that generally has to handle IT problems this is a pretty awesome, effortless setup. We generally just don’t have issues. I occasionally have to fight that Windows server running the Blackberry software, and occasionally have to fight Zimbra but that is about it.
We use iWork, Google Docs/Sites, and Omnigraffle almost exclusively for documents.
Mobile Devices
Apple wins this one. We’re 5:1 iPhones to Blackberry devices. As the “IT guy” i’ll add that I don’t think I have ever had to help anyone troubleshoot their iPhones but have to assist with the Blackberry units pretty frequently – especially with respect to the synchronization with Zimbra.
Conclusion
Our equipment load out at WeTheCitizens is very efficient and exceptionally low maintenance. Perhaps the complete Linux/Mac/iPhone usage wouldn’t work at a larger place but that is a small company advantage. You can actually trust everyone in the office and don’t have to waste time locking things up, slowing people down, or preventing work from being productive.
