I cannot access the Mac Developer resources this morning.
With a company as advannced as Apple, I would expect them to be able to roll out web updates
seamlessly.
I don't like being out in the cold.
I want to download the Mavericks Beta.
Some things are dawning on me (you know like if you sit outside long enough at night...).
It sounds to me like a hacker found one vulnerability in a complex system supporting 1.5 million developers, so they decided to scrap the entire system and re-architect it from the bottom up. Changing everything at once goes against my incrementall mindset. Anyway, this is what I cakl a major hack, when you change a ton of stuff at once and expect it to hang together just so. While I meditated on that, I remembered my motto that I tell managers when they ask for the unreasonable. "Nothing can be done in a week". Sure you can fudge up some demo code, but certainly nothing robust. Anything done in a week won't have any sort of documentation.
The old system grew slowly as concepts like cryptographic signatures entered the picture and signing applications became the norm.
The other thing I wanted to mention was what IBM learned during a famous development where they tried to bring in more help to finish a project that was lagging. So in my mind I am picturing blood on the walls at Apple. People that have been working around the clock for a week are becoming zombies.
The pressure of having 1.5 million developers waiting on you is more extreme than anything I have ever experienced. At this point I wonder if they are considering putting the old system back up and just fixing the little piece that was broken. After all, what is the contingency plan if this new redesign doesn't come off in a reasonable amount of time. I wonder whose idea it was to throw the bathwater out with the baby.
Apple has enough money that they can weather just about anything, but what about the 1.5 million developers depending on Apple's infrastructure.
Personally, I realy think they just had an unexpected problem with the restore.
A hacker gets into some minor info...
They closed the system down immediately, and then said we will 'back it up and restore'
We have a plan in place for this, and now is a good time to implement and test the 'backup and restore contingency'.
Well, as always, the 'backup and restore' didn't go quite as smooth as initially thought.
etreSoft - Please change your name to Devil's advocate. A failure to see the consequences of being down for a month means nothing to the "Current" Apple leadership because of the pot of gold they are sitting on today. They think it will be there for ever. Same mistake Novell and IBM made early in life.
For me "The True Enterprise Developer" it is hard to make the case against my Microsoft friends that want to implement Surfaces instead of iPads when they are using the Argument that how can you committ long term to Apple when they are this unrelieable.
The inability to get back online whether it was due to a clunky system or a security risk is irrelelvant, their should have been contingencies.
This is major and if we talk about the elephant in the Room, Apple needs new leadership just like Eric needs to come out of the closet and retire.
This is why I intend to sit out the provisioning portal for a few days after its resurrection. Apple probably hasn't scrapped everything for a complete rewrite, but I don't doubt what did get reworked won't be optimal and suffer glitches.
If they had to rejigger a couple DBs, that in itself could take substantial time simply rolling out those changes. I might imagine they threw certs into more bullet proof bucket. Something like that might have just taken time.
The wording of the Apple updates still suggests to me somebody lacking much spit and polish communicating a timeline or at the very least dealing with customers that have schedules and timelines.
A seasoned project manager or developer they weren't.
Has anyone actually logged into the Bug Reporter on the status page? I think it's the original OS X design. Hope the new Dev Portal doenst look like this 🙂
I just tried out of curiosity and got an error.
Edit: I tried a second time and was able to log in. It does look old school.
Same behaviour here. I got no experience on WebObjets but seems strange.
Apple should provide free Enterprise Memberships for the amount of down time we have experienced. If not we should be reimbursed in time. At the least they should be sending us iPad Mini's.
douglas_goodall wrote:
The pressure of having 1.5 million developers waiting on you is more extreme than anything I have ever experienced.
Imagine if there were six million - which there are 🙂. There are 1.5 million new developers in the past year.
I'm quite sure Apple is not re-doing the entire Developer infrastructure. Not a chance. What they are doing is a systematic review of all external access points for security vulnerabilities.
It is no secret that Apple's developer efforts just don't get the same level of polish as the consumer-oriented products. Apple expects developers to be able to figure out lots of stuff on their own. Anyone who has benefited from Apple's developer infrastructure knows how much money they (personally - not Apple) have made because of it. They aren't going to begrudge a little necessary downtime.
Primarily this is an embarassement for Apple. Apple can no longer claim such a stellar security reputation as in the past. Hopefully they will come out of it a little more humble and responsive to developer needs.
Love all the hype in this thread. It's great entertainment. "Oh, I placed all my faith and planning in Apple being up always and forever, and now a week of downtime is causing my business to fold! Boohoo me!"
Ok, I get it. Apple being down is a pain in the arse. However, if you run a large development shop as I do, this should be no more than a minor annoyance.
What are we doing? First off, we always renew our certs every 6 months. Sure they last a year, but by renewing every six months we ensure an ill-timed outage will not leave us hanging. Have we started new projects since the outage began? Yes, and we're developing using wildcard bundle id's. Sure it limits us in some minor ways, but the bulk of development can continue.
For those of you claiming you can't distribute your Ad Hoc apps to your internal users, that's not what Ad Hoc is for. It sounds like you need an Enterprise license.
For those of you complaining Apple owes you for the outage because you pay for the developers license. Oh, yeah big money there. What are you out, a buck seventy-five? Even at the Enterprise license cost of $300 a year that amounts to 80-something cents a day. Wow, a week of downtime and you could almost by a cheap lunch!
Did Apple screw up? Yes. Should Apple have had better security testing and contingency plans? Yes. Should Apple communicate better? Yes. Does Apple need to fix this fast? Yes. However, basing your business on Apple's constant availably is not Apple's fault. That's your's.
One of the best Level 1 posts ever.
Well said.
It's not hard to discern who is the real enterprise developer in this thread.
Agreed.
And I'm starting to wonder if some of the 'devs' here that are upset over the outage so much are from the same crowd that is always demanding more than 100 slots for 'testing'...
A few guys in a basement is not a large development shop.
K T wrote:
Agreed.
And I'm starting to wonder if some the 'devs' here that are upset over the outage so much are from the same crowd that is always demanding more than 100 slots for 'testing'...
I have to admit. As a software architect for a company that employs over 50,000 and has a group of 145 developers (not counting Q/A, etc) working on >10 apps who are all sharing the same ADC dist acct. I can understand a desire to request more than 100 test slots.
Granted, we do a really good job of resource management.
Granted also, I'm not one of the folks vociferously complaining 🙂
A_T_J wrote:
...
For those of you claiming you can't distribute your Ad Hoc apps to your internal users, that's not what Ad Hoc is for. It sounds like you need an Enterprise license.
...
What about those with enterprise licenses, which expired during the outage and need to renew, resign, test and redistribute apps before the profiles expire? We've got dozens of apps which need to be distributed to thousands of devices and that takes time. 30 days is tight as it is, cutting that in half (or possibly more) is a big deal. If they are down for almost a month, that could put us in crisis mode. Enterprise customers are no better off. In fact, I argue that we are worse off, since we're expiring.
//edit: Spelling
Why is the Apple Mac Developer portal down, and for how long?
