I see more and more job offers around DevOps, I see a lot of infrastructure providers, the staple cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, even Digital Ocean, moving from IaaS to Abstraction services or Software a Service, where they just provide the tools to consume the service, you don't need to worry about securing, patching, etc. all of which were Linux administration duties.
Some of SysAdmins that I know, agree that having an infrastructure using VMs (Virtual Machines) with Linux with a cloud provider is not a good practice, is not scalable (they say), you are not taking advantage of all the sweet features that the cloud is building for you, etc, .
I wonder if Linux Administration will still be a thing in the near future, or a career that someone will pursue when going out of college or university, and if that is even something to recommend to newly graduates, since we, as IT professionals, love to recommend the future, not the current needs, we give advice like: don’t code on PHP or Java, the new hot language is Python or Go… you will have more chances of succeeding in life.
I know that a lot of the services that the cloud currently provide have Linux running behind of them, and probably the use of Linux is at is high, in the Stack Overflow survey they ranked number one with 55 % of preference.
Will AWS build its own OS and ditch Linux?
Hard to tell… but something is clear, they have the resources to do it, they already have an operating system for their mobile devices.
AWS has also forked the Open Source solution of Elasting Search, and has rolled it out, which is a big hit for Open Source projects… and a big hit for cloud users.
Elastic is leading the fight against cloud providers.
If you’re a free software purist, though, you’d probably applaud what Elastic has done. In essentially making it much harder for cloud providers to build SaaS platforms using someone else’s code, the company has taken the bold stance necessary to achieve meaningful change with regard to the way clouds use open source.
No other open source organization has gone this far. Most open source projects and companies do little to stop cloud providers from co-opting their software, even if doing so constrains user freedoms and allows cloud providers to profit off of open source developers’ work while offering nothing in return. They’ve presumably done this because they haven’t been bold enough to take a strong stance against the large public clouds that increasingly rule the world of IT.
Cloud Architecture is the 🆕 thing
Nearly all the cloud providers have an academia and offer certification so that you can demonstrate that you can use their services.
For AWS the cost of the exam is from $150 to $300 USD.
For a Linux certification the price is higher, see just some examples:
- Linux Foundation cost per exam: $300 USD
- RedHat Certified Engineer cost per exam: $400 USD
Interest of: Cloud Architect 🆚 Linux Architect
Linux Architect interest was similar to the interest of Cloud Architect, but on 2016 the interest over Cloud Architect have just keep growing.
The related searches indicate where is the interest at.
Final thoughts
I see less useful to know Linux in a cloud first era, where the number of people getting certified to be a Cloud Architect is growing, while the number of people looking to get a Linux certification is decreasing.
The current tools make a great abstraction of service without needing to have strong knowledge of Linux, are more developer friendly and allow to build products faster.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing, this is just something that could happen sooner than we have thought about.
Do you think Linux is getting killed by AWS?
Latest comments (34)
I'd like to comment on some of questions you pose, and your points.
"Will AWS build its own OS and ditch Linux?" -- let me answer a question with another question - do you see new kernels built each day? Linux had about 30M LOC at the beginning of 2020, with about 4k contributors each year. It's being developed since early 1990s. Do you think Amazon, or anybody else, are gonna be able to pull that off, and build a proprietary kernel (which still has to adhere to POSIX standards), in say less than 10-20 years? The main question here is - why they would even do that? What's wrong with Linux from their perspective?
"Nearly all the cloud providers have an academia and offer certification so that you can demonstrate that you can use their services." -- well, supply meets demand. In my experience, these certificates only bring money to the issuers and don't reflect real knowledge in a slightest bit.
Also, what is Linux architect? What is Cloud architect? Linux and Cloud are like apples and oranges; and then I cannot even remotely imagine what a Linux architect is supposed to do. Most probably she doesn't architect Linux itself. Probably it's some business application architecture. Why call her Linux architect, how does the fundamental architecture problems tie to OS in generic sense? Same with Cloud architect, sure, using AWS or GCP or whatever has its quirks. But if one can only do something in the cloud, I doubt one understands how the cloud works.
"I see less useful to know Linux in a cloud first era" -- it's just, the complexity is being buried under abstractions. The fact that abstraction hides implementation details from you doesn't mean that the implementation details are not gonna bite you. I saw far too many people that, when asked "How would you plan capacity for your service?" in a system design interview, would say "I'd check this tickbox in AWS. It would do everything automatically for me". And that works... except when it doesn't, and then you're left completely clueless without understanding the underlying abstractions.
I'm really frustrated by the fact that people see no benefits in knowing how the Big Magic Black Box works anymore. That just means you can't operate that Black Box, and eventually the knowledge would fade away. And this is, at least to me, a bad thing.
Thanks for this long thoughtful comment, this blog post is to talk about it, and think about it... I want Linux to win... I don't want us to just rely too much on the abstractions of vendors...
Unfortunately, one way or another, the moment your product starts to rely on a certain cloud provider, you're locked-in. If you're using multiple clouds, well, you're locked in multiple vendors. The only way out of it is to use self-built systems on self-owned hardware in a self-built datacenter. Starting from there, everything depends on the money you're able to spend on h/w and engineers, and thus on your scale. Then, take one step backward at a time until you reach the point when you can afford it. Rent a datacenter, rent hardware, rent EC2 instances/generic compute, and if you can't afford that - rent managed services.
I'd bet Docker killed more linux admin jobs than aws. I've been using ci/cd automation to build docker images for half a decade, I can't imagine going back to a world before ecs/kubernetes. In my situation sysadmin role is non-existent, system health is controlled by container management and in the domain of devops.
Why do so many tech writers call Python (released 1991) a "new language" when comparing it to Java, which came out in 1996?
I've been recently in the job market as a 5+ Linux Admin/Sys Eng. There are some niche jobs I've interviewed at where you can still manage physical infrastructure with unique startups or small orgs.
The reality is any good high paying job today is going to be DevOps and it's going to be highly automated using python or go + a cavalcade of buzzwordy tools. It's really not great for those of us who love Linux and want to use it to the fullest.
The cloud is really the top choice for most business who rather have it standardized, automated by a 3rd party and easy to use...
The times they are a changin'
The article is misleading, it speaks about ditching the OS level, however AWS doesn't care about the OS, they only care about the hypervisor use to run these OS'es, and want to remain open to hosting a large (and growing) number of OSes.
Linux alone is still not an hypervisor. Windows now has its own hypervisor, Hyper-V (still optional but more often required if you intend to use some of its features, but Microsoft partnered with Amazon and Google and a few others so that hypervisors other than Hyper-V could be used as an alternative).
On Linux, there are no hypervisor at the kernel level (remember that Linux fundamentally is just the kernel, not its many environments and distributions). But Linux offers some services in the kernel (most of them inside optional drivers) to allow running several hypervisors with good performance (for now it supports well Xen, or VirtualBox, or Hyper-V with some limitations on the Windows guest, a few other will come; and I'm quite sure that Amazon won't kill this Linux kernel capability, it may just add a few other drivers for impoved performance, management or security)
Then AWS can choopse whatever they want for their very large AWS hypervisor. It will still support various VMs running Linux, Windows, Android, or specific VMs tuned for several containers, or for lightweights "functions" or "no-code" and "low-code" solutions (most of them not running VMs or multiple processes or threads, but very thin "fibers" that you can install and instanciate in a few microseconds and that can stay "dormant" for extended periods of time, and costing almost nothing and that can be hosted anywhere dynamically: a perfect choice for Amazon in AWS or Microsoft in Azure, or Google as well, as this will also be very cost-effective and attractive for many more customers than those they currently have).
So what is the problem? Linux support for hypervisors is still not enough integrated and there's a lack of common base that can be used with all hypervisors for all types of deployments (soft or hard, at VM, or containers of threads like Kubernates, or fibers for functions and many event-driven web apps and RESTAPI services).
Microsoft is working on this, so does Amazon, nothing bad. But Linux.org still lays a bit behind and still focuses a standalone full VM with its kernel which is still not easily extensible for modern architectures and deployment needs: full VMs are not the best option for everyone, it's fine for small servers managed and owned by a single person or a small team.
Linux is definitely not dead, it effectively scales on many more different architectures (as long as the universal worlwide cloud is not involved). We still lack a web-centered OS, whereas Linux/Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android are still host-centered, jsut like most databases and storages): OSes must be able to rethink what is an "app"? Is is still necessarily a "process"? Should web services replace apps, and instead of managing resources by host, they should manage user environments from any access point, using arbitrary computing resources deployed on demand and running virtually nowhere precisely but only inside a environment centered on individual identities owned by users and hosted anywhere and accessbiel from anywhere?
But for now we still need an OS on at least one device, we still live in a binary world of the client/server split. We need more tiers, and refocus on users (and the capability offered to users to create as many identities as they want and isolate them when inteacting with other "identities" on the web (this would be great for user's privacy). but for that we still lack a real "network OS" (where everything is virtualized, and the only "host" is the Internet as a whole.
Linux usage in servers may vary over time according to needs, but will likely not disappear, because it is versatile and mutable -> thank you open source and forking!
Linux usage in personal computers will continue to grow as new features, better GUIs, and more tools make distros more accessible to the average user.
Also, it's Elastic Search, not Elasting Search. AWS stole the IP of Elastic Search, and have the legal budget to get away with IP theft. Microsoft and Oracle are in the cloud fight too.
Amazon Linux is already in existence, and no, AWS isn't killing Linux. ECS and EC2 for example run containers and virtual machines environments respectively, both running Linux in the vast majority of uses.
I'll be honest, this article is really poorly researched.
Pretty sure Canonical's ubuntu has a lot of ties with Amazon, given the placement of the Amazon link by default on the Gnome3 desktop environment.
But Linux is not going anywhere. It's a core dependency for a lot of web services throughout the world.
Linux will not be ditched by AWS or any other cloud providers for sure, BUT the jobs related to the system already lost the battle to Cloud things.
In general, there are more positions regarding Cloud instead of system. In some businesses or sectors, it's really rare to find they have recently deployed/designed infrastructure on-prem or private cloud.
In 5-10 yrs your robot assistant will write better code than you ever could.
Everything in IT can and will be automated away. It's already happening.
Not quite. In 5-10 years a junior level developer will be more powerful than any other time in history, and experienced devs might use powerful code completion tools as if they were syntax linters (they will just tell you that there is a more efficient option). Nothing will change for the masters, if you're willing to learn vim for fun, you probably won't be affected by the robot invasion.
Maybe, but I think you are under estimating the speed of innovation, and the amount of greed out in the world.
Meh, I think most people are overestimating what machine learning can achieve. Computers are great at logic, but posses zero creativity. They can beat you at chess because there are highly defined rules, but in the real world there are too many variables to "just try all of the options and see what works". The difference between a developer and a great developer is creativity, and knowing how to make complex things into simple things so they can be reasoned about.