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The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

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Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#21

Post by rdsubhas »

As a "major theme", the author takes:

> Consider for example Hadoop. Nobody seems to know how to build Hadoop from scratch. It’s an incredible mess of dependencies, version requirements and build tools.

And as the major introduction to the blog post:

> I’m not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keep systems running, manage update and upgrade paths.

Huh? Old-school sysadmins know how to keep systems running, manage updates and upgrades. At the same time nobody knows how to build Hadoop from scratch. At the same time, Hadoop build instructions themselves have curl|sh scripts or mirrors and the wiki page is outdated. And it uses Java (and thus maven/ivy). And that downloads the internet.

According to the blog, Hadoop, maven/ivy/sbt/any dependency manager, package managers, and everything is broken. But the tagline is:

> This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs

What does any of this have to do with the "Age of containers" and pre-built VMs? Is the author just talking about Gentoo/LFS-style "compile the whole system from scratch"?

This feels like an incredibly rushed rant. I can only envision the author requiring to setup hadoop for the first time, breaking their head for a few days (it happens), and taking it out on everything.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#23

Post by loteck »

The clearest explanation of why this happens is at the end:

Before, admins would try hard to prevent security holes, now they call themselves “devops” and happily introduce them to the network themselves!

1) The merging of devs into the sysadmin role was a product of: the work of sysadmins (particularly systems change control and security compliance) not being valued in our culture.

2) Devs delighted to be free of the shackles placed upon them by sysadmins who were encumbered by the concerns expressed in this article.

If you were a devop who resolved to fix the problems bemoaned in this article, my guess is you would turn around in 60 days to discover you'd become a sysadmin.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#24

Post by dagss »

megaman22 wrote: post #14
pc86 wrote: post #5

> None of these "fancy" tools still builds by a traditional make command. Is there anything more "get-off-my-lawn" than "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

But I just don't understand why we have to have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems or job runners or whatever the new fad term is for every language, when there's something that does what they all do, is battle-tested, and has been around for decades. Everyone repeat after me. Makefiles are not scary. I can write a shell script. Do I really need to learn grunt/gulp/webpack/npm/rake/fake/maven/gradle/ant and…

I wish there was something like an updated Make, a tool that works for everything but updated to 2018.

For instance Make works based on timestamps and therefore works very poorly together with git. Switch to another branch and you can get weird effects based on what files were updated and not and often trigger needless rebuilds. And everyone uses git these days.

GNU Make, just using hashes instead of timestamps, would be a huge step forward.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#25

Post by jchw »

Hadoop is a rather extreme example... It's bad, but not everything nowadays is. Many newer pieces of software install entirely from source with one command.

Also, this is not at all endemic of containers, there's simply zero connection. Dockerfiles tend to be very simple and easy to reason about. The most complex application I have is around 50 lines of Dockerfile, and that's mostly just made more complicated to arrange things for the best layer caching.

I suppose we're supposed to believe that this is somehow worse than the days of debugging m4 macros and autotools just to get a build that doesn't work.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#26

Post by Tehchops »

pc86 wrote: post #5

> None of these "fancy" tools still builds by a traditional make command. Is there anything more "get-off-my-lawn" than "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

> "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

Pretty much. I know several admins who appear to be joining a growing pool of luddites who rail against anything new. They're particularly butt-mad about anyone drawing more salary than them. "DevOps" is their favored totem to direct their ire at.

I used to try and convince them otherwise, but it turned out to be a completely futile waste of time. At the end of the day, persistent FUD just means a more lucrative job market for the engineers who are pragmatic and fearless enough to give an honest try at making the newer paradigms work for their employers.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#27

Post by triztian »

gigatexal wrote: post #7

Ugh make files. Kill me. Give me a bash script or give me death.

Whats wrong with Makefiles?; they're quick and easy ways to describe how to build simple and _not super_ complicated systems.

I've found this to be a great resource, hope you find it useful:

* http://gromnitsky.users.sourceforge.net/articles/notes-for-n...

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#28

Post by kbrwn »

There are plenty of mechanisms in the container ecosystem to address each of the problems the author states. Building software isn't all that it is cracked up to be and it isn't very fun. Often times build steps for open source projects are not well documented or the build process is inherently difficult to push a paid product. Example: nginx

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#29

Post by carrja99 »

rdsubhas wrote: post #21

As a "major theme", the author takes: > Consider for example Hadoop. Nobody seems to know how to build Hadoop from scratch. It’s an incredible mess of dependencies, version requirements and build tools. And as the major introduction to the blog post: > I’m not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keep systems running, manage update and upgrade paths. Huh? Old-school sysadmins know how to keep syst…

It's a rant, my inclination is that it has to do with a very specific situation the author is facing at work.
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