Who’s On Phirst

Ops folks hate agents. Hate them. I was in the same camp back in my data center days. The reasons are pretty obvious, right? Who wants to have to install and maintain another piece of software on every server? No one. Not only that, but agents scare the bejesus out of people running production systems. A small program that executes commands locally from a remote source is super scary no matter what. Like clowns with fangs scary. Add in the chance for that little agent to go rogue and start consuming resources or leaking memory or hording ports and scary quickly morphs into dread.

With all the revolutions going on in server infrastructure agents are also becoming more and more inconvenient. Virtualized environments and cloud computing make the servers themselves much more ephemeral than in other days past. Maintaining agents to these here-today-gone-tomorrow servers, and all the references to them, and the configurations they require, is just too time consuming and troublesome. It’s a hold over architecture from days past when “server” meant a thing with a form factor and a fan, not dynamically allocated memory and processor time.

Phurnace doesn’t play that game. We connect over the network – no agents required. That gives us tremendous flexibility to fit into the existing infrastructure architecture of our clients. Also, it allows us to configure and maintain servers regardless if they are physical, virtual, or cloudy. Ultimately our customers don’t like being told how they have to do things – they want products that fit how they want to work, not have to work the way a product demands. Being agentless is part of our flexibility that let’s our customers do that. And of course, makes us far less scary.