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?
Oldest comments (34)
After reading the title I was ready to say
no
straight away, but after reading the post itself, I'm not that sure anymore. Very good points actually!Thank you @bobbyiliev , I was not trying to say its dead or something, just saying it seems to be less relevant as it used to be...
For most of the DevOpses -- maybe.
For advanced / good DevOpses? Of course NO
good DevOpses will have to keep maintaining, and hopefully bring some light to this...
The problem with cloud is that customers are surrendering all their data (aka business) to providers. Ransomware might be considered child's play compared to cloud business, in a few years. :-p
Seriously: the open source movement was about freeing your systems. With the cloud, you don't even have systems. How dumb is this?
I understand the need for more flexible systems, though.
More problems to solve... there will be work to do.
The open source movement will always live on. But I don't get why cloud services are being so heavily pushed.
"cloud services are being so heavily pushed"
recurring payments are better than one time payments :)
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!)
Great comment @jefmes !!
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.
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.
The cloud is built on Linux - so the answer is no, AWS is not killing Linux. But it's killing Linux admin jobs. If you absolutely don't want to work on anything but Linux you might find a good job at any cloud provider.
You are right. Mariano Rentería is perhaps saying that Linux administrator work will be less required due to AWS.
I think this is just a fear of Mariano. For example on AWS to perform a disaster recovery you need to know how GNU / Linux works, at least a little.
Most of these sweet services cloud providers are offering are lock-in features, there is no standard, no interoperability, no way to reproduce this environments locally for development or testing.
And you learn need to learn Azure, and AWS, and Digital Ocean and all of them offer the stuff just different... quite annoying.
It's a fragmentation issue coupled with the fact that they are trying to lock developers into their own cloud based eco system.
AWS is not killing Linux, if anything its solidifying its market share with services like ECS. If you mean managing mutable VM's then yes, this is going away with or without AWS.
I don't think Linux is going anywhere anytime soon.
The internet runs on top of Linux and all those managed services offered by AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, etc) runs on Linux servers.
They are just making it easier for developers to quickly release their ideas by creating abstraction layers.
The turth of the matter is that not all programming is web programming.
Linux is an essential part of many industries - for instance embedded software, where it is a lot easier to use Linux than write your own OS.
That bit about using Linux rathet than writing your own OS also works for the cloud - the companies with the resources you mentioned are more likely to invest in custom kernels, keeping anything else they might need rather than building a whole new env, which would be a waste of time and money because Linux already has decades of functional code behind it.
Finally, even if we stick to more traditional web and network uses, many companies will prefer to use their own server or emulate the cloud due to IP, privacy or plain convenience - imagine trying to edit terabytes of video material off of the cloud at a mobie studio for instance. I've also read developer accounts of companies trying serverless and then going back because the flow just didn't suit their pipeline.
All in all, the new serverless approach has it's uses, and is undoubtedly gaining more and more traction, however, this does not mean Linux will die off anytime soon.
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.