Title: Obsolete in the IT crossfire
Author: Solène
Date: 09 July 2021
Tags: life linux unix openbsd
Description:
# Preamble
This is not an article about some tech but more me sharing feelings
about my job, my passion and IT. I've met a Linux system at first in
the early 2000 and I didn't really understand what this was, I've
learned it the hard way by wiping Windows on the family computer (which
was quite an issue) and since that time I got a passion with computers.
I made a lot of mistakes that made me progress and learn more, and the
more I was learning, the more I saw the amount of knowledge I was
missing.
Anyway, I finally got a decent skill level if I could say, but I
started early and so my skill is related to all of that early Linux
ecosystem. Tools are evolving, Linux is morphing into something
different a bit more every year, practices are evolving with the
"Cloud". I feel lost.
# Within the crossfire
I've met many people along my ride in open source and I think we can
distinguish two schools (of course I know it's not that black and
white): the people (like me) who enjoy the traditional ecosystem and
the other group that is from the Cloud era. It is quite easy to bash
the opposite group and I feel sad when I assist at such dispute.
I can't tell which group is right and which is wrong, there is
certainly good and bad in both. While I like to understand and control
how my system work, the other group will just care about the produced
service and not the underlying layers. Nowadays, you want your service
uptime to have as much nine as you can afford (99.999999) at the cost
of having complex setup with automatic respawning services on failure,
automatic routing within VMs and stuff like that. This is not
necessarily something that I enjoy, I think a good service should have
a good foundation and restarting the whole system upon failure seems
wrong, although I can't deny it's effective for the availability.
I know how a package manager work but the other group will certainly
prefer to have a tool that will hide all of the package manager
complexity to get the job done. Tell ansible to pop a new virtual
machine on Amazon using Terraform with a full nginx-php-mysql stack
installed is the new way to manage servers. It seems a sane option
because it gets the job done, but still, I can't find myself in there,
where is the fun? I can't get the fun out of this. You can install
the system and the services without ever see the installer of the OS
you are deploying, this is amazing and insane at the same time.
I feel lost in this new era, I used to manage dozens of system (most
bare-metal, without virtualization), I knew each of them that I bought
and installed myself, I knew which process should be running and their
usual CPU/memory usage, I got some acquaintance with all my systems. I
was not only the system administrator, I was the IT gardener. I was
working all the time to get the most out of our servers, optimizing
network transfers, memory usage, backups scripts. Nowadays you just
pop a larger VM if you need more resources and backups are just
snapshots of the whole virtual disk, their lives are ephemeral and
anonymous.
# To the future
I would like to understand better that other group, get more confident
with their tools and logic but at the same time I feel some aversion
toward doing so because I feel I'm renouncing to what I like, what I
want, what made me who I am now. I suppose the group I belong too will
slowly fade away to give room to the new era, I want to be prepared to
join that new era but at the same time I don't want to abandon the
people of my own group by accelerating the process.
I'm a bit lost in this crossfire. Should a resistance organize against
this? I don't know, I wouldn't see the point. The way we do computing
is very young, we are looking for a way. Humanity has been making
building for thousands and years and yet we still improve the way we
build houses, bridges and roads, I guess that the IT industry is
following the same process but as usual with computers, at an insane
rate that humans can barely follow.
# Next
Please share with me by email or mastodon or even IRC if you feel
something similar or if you got past that issue, I would be really
interested to speak about this topic with other people.
# Readers reactions
(HTM) ew.srht.site reply
# After thoughts (UPDATE post publication)
I got many many readers giving me their thoughts about this article and
I'm really thankful for this.
Now I think it's important to realize that when you want to deploy
systems at scale, you need to automate all your infrastructure and then
you lose that feeling with your servers. However, it's still possible
to have fun because we need tooling, proper tooling that works and
bring a huge benefit. We are still very young in regards to automation
and lot of improvements can be done.
We will still need all those gardeners enjoying their small area of
computer because all the cloud services rely on their work to create
duplicated system in quantity that you can rely on. They are making
the first most important bricks required to build the "Cloud", without
them you wouldn't have a working Alpine/CentOS/FreeBSD/etc... to deploy
automatically.
Both can coexist, both should know better each other because they will
have to live together to continue the fantastic computer journey,
however the first group will certainly be in a small number compared to
the other.
So, not everything is lost! The Cloud industry can be avoided by
self-hosting at home or in associative datacenter/colocations but it's
still possible to enjoy some parts of the great shift without giving up
all we believe in. A certain balance can be found, I'm quite sure of
it.