Re: more on broken schools

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

What a shame. =( Would have been great to add a Brazilian school to my
customers!

>
You can still add a Brazilian school to your clientele.  I'm just not a
school. :)

True. But too much time and trouble when there are plenty of potential customers
close by.

works over there.  It seems like a pretty nice business.  I would really

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It's alright. It's more of a side business actually. The main business
is consulting as teachers, and we then have the lab environment as a
nice value add service that we sell when we get the consulting gig as
teachers.

>
So the main service is what?  A set of teachers to give a school the
ability to teach computer courses?  Suppose I'm a high school.  How do
would you offer to me your services?  I currently have a single teacher
who teaches a Python course---the teacher is a math teacher.

The main service is teachers who work as consultants teaching IT. Value add
services are lab environments in "the cloud", a piece of software automating
grade reporting to the government web site which is close to being unusable, and
a platform for online tests.

The challenge is inertia and trust. There are a lot of schools who run
azure, are unhappy, and refuse to change because the alterantive is
not azure. So they end up paying 10x or more, because they do not
trust small business. It is very sad. =(

>
That made me think your service is just a cloud-like service---storage,
office-like web applications, mail, calendar, video conference et
cetera.  Are there teachers involved?

No, just virtual machines. Too much trouble and too little profit in delivering
office 365 equivalents, calendar and email. We could if we wanted to, but that
would probably require an entire school shifting from Microsoft to us, and I
doubt it will happen. It also probably would mean that we would need to hire
another person to spread the admin and support load, and that would probably not
make it worth it. I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not actively selling it either.

love to run a business like that.  And I would be able to if I we were
back in the 90s, I guess.  Am I too off the facts?

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I think you could do it today if you dedicated a couple of months to
building up the environment. OpenStack has come a _long_ way and is no
longer the enormous beast to setup that it once was.

>
That's interesting.  But tell me about the teachers because I didn't get
the whole thing yet.  I would think a service like that would require a
24-7 support as the most challenging part.

No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab environment, so if
it goes down for 15 minutes the students just shrug their shoulders and try
again later. But, to be honest, there is very little downtime, and we also have
3 regions/servers. So in case of downtime, first fix is to shift a student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If that
doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10 minutes. If that doesn't
work, reinstall the enviroment which might take 20-40 minutes.