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>immutable servers, which run peer reviewed remedial scripts via
falcolas, you have just induced in my understanding, a sigbificant and revelatory comprehension.
I could just say that the simple fact that you have exposed to my unfortunately protected thinking, should be the first and foremost statement I'd like to see presented, to introduce anyone to any discussion of server orchestration and containers and related tools.
I have worked in a very much more corporative and buttoned down organisation that I think is the experience of all but relatively few among the prototypical HN participants.
only for this reason, hace i written as much as I dare, to grapple with the complexity of ny environment and experience that's contributory to - but not reason for- my own blindness to this revelation for me, and simple fact to you, that the serious point that modern orchestration provides antidote to arbitrary systems management.
This message should be able to be heard from beyond our solar system.
Seriously, the message is not getting through to my generation and my employment situation. And that is the most shocking upsetting, I think I can truly say it's upsetting, news for it's entirely non optional for me (and people in comparable situations) to accept extremely serious error that I am inadvertently responsible for by oversight, and find out how to react immediately and comprehensively. This isn't a easy thing in business culture I'm involved with.
Why hasn't this message been better communicated? I know when I was young, I declared everything was obvious and added my own shate of hurt to knowledge generally by failing to convert colleagues to my causes who should have been natural sympathisers.
I definitely am sure that I am seeing a effect of the modern eay of communicating new technology: community is liable to be less coordinated than corporation, and collective excitement is often insufficiently generalised to get the most important and obvious points across. I mean nothing pejorative, but the volume of blogs expressing the cool possibilities which are enabled by technological modernity, are inevitably forced to share with readers their specific and generally narrow applicability. I think this context causes memory to associate with the ends rather than the means, for one difference between a community explosion of interest, and the key phrases required to open the door to executive suites. I think you have even given me a possible new career direction. Without any doubt, you certainly have provided me with the skeleton key with which to open the vast volume of new trch and techniques, that will allow me to present the plausibly immediate not insignificant concrete benefits to make a impact with orchestration services, precisely where they're not receiving any positive attention. I have deduced, in the course of half a hour, that it's clear that while I am usually the translator for my baby boomer colleagues, I myself needed help with this understanding, and consequently I can see the naisssance of a business plan which I can forsee connecting from dorm room to boardroom. Generations often speak different languages, in tech, more so. I earlier today, only just admitted to myself that I"don't understand what the youngsters are saying", possibly priming myself to listen to your message this evening, though I hope you are not insulted I am guessing you're a bit younger than me... I grew up needing big machines to do anything much. I grew up with printed documents. (my first own library was proudly topped with the VMS "grey shelf",) and the idea of seeking, let alone using, "unofficial' administrative procedures, wasn't merely anathema to working culture, but a actual career risk, if you were identified so adventuring. I have been long convinced that a new approach to computing reference writing is overdue, and the world needs a canonical dissection of the forests of opportunity just to relieve the natural trepidation I feel is increasingly felt, possibly maybe the result of the success of computing, grown in influence that's so much greater than formerly, therefore affecting entirely new cultural interfaces at the margin.
But I have been prompted to cease lurking and comment, because I have had my "ive seen the light" moment, and I can only apologise in advance if I speak out of turn.
I don't know how I managed to remain ignorant of this fact that you have just provided, but the chances are that you have been thereby responsible for the positive transformation of a handful of small but business significant shops I still talk to, where the recent wave of automation tools has been met like the tide by so many ageing Knuts, of which I am one, the token youngest - I am not joking my age actually excuses me when raised eyebrows of incomprehension are all I get for my trials.. I'm in my later forties.. - where the MO is to throw a immense budget at optimization for keeping clients running on fat server images that won't require orchestration.
I am not really comprehending this because my reaction is so conflicted. I have been successful in promoting a self deprecating humor to balance the most outrageous elements of the bad Experience Knows Best culture. I managed this by exaggerating my acceptance of my inferior knowledge by complete reductio ad absurdam where appropriate, and submitting RFQs for my approaches as costed time, and by setting by myself new internal documentation standards to make clear that private ownership of critical maintenance procedures is a real example of how hard to document is hard to guarantee. But rather than a internal wiki, the result was- undoubtedly impressive but missing the point- histories of the origin of business situation needs and deprecated dbms behaviours and OS calls still checked for. Everyone was justifying past work instead of looking towards comprehensibility in new situations. I am still trying to get the suggestion of a blog in homage to Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, past being shot variously, "letting clients under the hood", "giving up our DR experience to competition" (meaning the former employees who outnumber the current and actually do lose chances of getting accounts from us because of_very strong FUD in the sales dept. This is a genuine, albeit surpassable, issue. I see how contractors could argue their work against the Old New Thing approach,in billed hours, most effectively.)
falcolas I simply never saw the obvious that scripts and config files touching sensitive subsystems are a natural fit for many eyes and public repo sanity review.
I have sat down for twenty minutes, before I could explain why I was just blind to what's been in front of my eyes yet remained unseen.
it's simple but I am quite devastated, thinking for myself and extrapolating the consequences of this learned blindness out to the radii of my sysadmin sphere:
none of us were able to Google for solutions when we were going through critical learning phases.
this is very scary suddenly to me, because I am witness to my own static immutable habituation, extremely clearly alongside the cost and effect. Not least because it will play to the sensibilities preferred by the constituency I need to influence, to begin with such a indictment of my own blindness to ingrained learning and its adverse effects.
Twenty years ago I couldn't imagine searching for a administrative solution to a work problem. Granted, I have been mostly employed in very sensitive shops where simply being a user of a DBMS was a trade secret for my contract terms. (Intersystems Cache a divergent MUMPS DBMS that I think many people here might like at least for curiosity, but also for having first class FFIs. A personal license is still free as in beer. This was slung into IIS based intranets like crazy by my company then, and with great ease I remember, but, barring the permissions, the same cluster was running critical trade DBs.. I wouldn't like to try that otherwise than on VMS..) Not for security, not overtly (the secrecy) but because management presented client portfolio web tools as more proprietary than they were.
consider my interview was focused on COM/CORBA and CICS interop... COM/COM+ was how NT servers were managed... arguably Power Shell made it unnecessary but is also a much nicer interface to the same thing.
Excuses like these above, are just terrible. If we have a lot of dependency on dot net, I am now staring at the very means to stop adding to the rubber band ball of layers holding back any kind of scale out plan, and my singular blindness can be measured in totally significant business and financial terms. If now I can set about taking distinct layers of front end to begin, to dot net core, able to prove that nothing has been tweaked to shim in the code I am not able to justify any arbitrary anything to, I can begin isolating the performance of layers that have been too long hidden in a congealed spitball of company history. (I mentioned CICS, there's dot net to COBOL interfaces, even a NT runtime for VMS DCL, in there. I will say, the one plus has been a extensive exposure to the really extreme end of scale up Intel and mainframe world hardware. When I indicated that I was leaving, some time back now, I was asked what I would stay for. My slowly considered answer was, a profit share of the consulting and services that we could get from my experience, as well as a safe harbour bridge for the IP I have built, to enable us to spib out if the opportunity arises. I genuinely like working with the characters I meet in the"big iron" world, made easier by the fact I'm not a clueless executive playing hardball to save my political neck, as I have been witness to where the sales premise of a big iron vendor delivering turnkey solutions suffers from too great distances between decisions and technology.)