I'm in the middle of trying to transition from 10 years of Systems Engineering + 5 years of BI Dev w/semi-Ops work into...whatever my next phase is...and as someone who loves working on computers in general, the cloud shift still feels disconcerting. Even with VM level abstraction, we were still managing our systems and making sure things were running well and were tuned correctly to their workloads. But I noticed specifically when "don't treat your servers as pets, treat them as cattle" started to become accepted as the norm that more and more of the jobs out there aren't interested in fine-tuning, aren't interested in careful engineering. There's so much focus on scalability (often for systems and apps that don't really need to scale) and designing for micro-services when so many organizations don't need the extra complexity of a micro-server architecture, that it's feeling like a few steps backwards to me.
I'm interested in doing more cloud work obviously because there's no doubt that many companies aren't going to go back to having to maintain their own infrastructure at a physical level, but there's still a gap somewhere that feels like something was lost, and maybe as time moves on the "sysadmin" will go back to treating their resource pools and pods as their new "pets" and we can stop pretending that careful management isn't still necessary. Along those lines, I don't think Linux is going anywhere for a while because we still need people who know how to take care of these systems (Windows too, really!)
Senior DevOps Engineer with 8.5+ years of experience. Otherwise an avid artist, reader, cinephile & football fan. Looking forward to connecting with everyone :)
While I agree that infrastructure is better off being treated as cattle than pets, it still needs to be kept equally clean, well maintained and sustainable. (there's no point for a small org to run their apps as multiple Kubernetes pods having GB sized containers for a problem that can be solved with few VMs in the name of autoscaling)
The example of Elastic given by the author sounds incorrect as much of their good features are available in their enterprise versions and it costs Amazon a whole lot of effort/time even to keep OpenDistro close to the upstream.
Coming to the point of Linux being obsolete, I believe it's based on strong foundations and thus thrived even amidst fierce competition from Windows/Mac OS for servers. This'd be more apparent as more people realise the power of configurable community systems available for free than paying a bomb for proprietary tech.
Also, the making of "apps" themselves has become so wrong that it's true that most apps don't really need to scale, but also the majority of the others need to scale because the app is badly written and engineered.
There is a lot of hate against CS universities lately, but not everyone realizes that this doesn't mean not knowing most of the things that a good university gives to you.
I blog in spanglish...
Programmer, futbol fan, avid reader, former chilango, neo queretano, very mexican; Director of Engineering at medtrainer.com, I've a podcast Chile, Mole & Tech.
I'm in the middle of trying to transition from 10 years of Systems Engineering + 5 years of BI Dev w/semi-Ops work into...whatever my next phase is...and as someone who loves working on computers in general, the cloud shift still feels disconcerting. Even with VM level abstraction, we were still managing our systems and making sure things were running well and were tuned correctly to their workloads. But I noticed specifically when "don't treat your servers as pets, treat them as cattle" started to become accepted as the norm that more and more of the jobs out there aren't interested in fine-tuning, aren't interested in careful engineering. There's so much focus on scalability (often for systems and apps that don't really need to scale) and designing for micro-services when so many organizations don't need the extra complexity of a micro-server architecture, that it's feeling like a few steps backwards to me.
I'm interested in doing more cloud work obviously because there's no doubt that many companies aren't going to go back to having to maintain their own infrastructure at a physical level, but there's still a gap somewhere that feels like something was lost, and maybe as time moves on the "sysadmin" will go back to treating their resource pools and pods as their new "pets" and we can stop pretending that careful management isn't still necessary. Along those lines, I don't think Linux is going anywhere for a while because we still need people who know how to take care of these systems (Windows too, really!)
Much appreciated comment & emotion!!
While I agree that infrastructure is better off being treated as cattle than pets, it still needs to be kept equally clean, well maintained and sustainable. (there's no point for a small org to run their apps as multiple Kubernetes pods having GB sized containers for a problem that can be solved with few VMs in the name of autoscaling)
The example of Elastic given by the author sounds incorrect as much of their good features are available in their enterprise versions and it costs Amazon a whole lot of effort/time even to keep OpenDistro close to the upstream.
Coming to the point of Linux being obsolete, I believe it's based on strong foundations and thus thrived even amidst fierce competition from Windows/Mac OS for servers. This'd be more apparent as more people realise the power of configurable community systems available for free than paying a bomb for proprietary tech.
Also, the making of "apps" themselves has become so wrong that it's true that most apps don't really need to scale, but also the majority of the others need to scale because the app is badly written and engineered.
There is a lot of hate against CS universities lately, but not everyone realizes that this doesn't mean not knowing most of the things that a good university gives to you.
Great comment @jefmes !!