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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)

#181

Post by Karrot_Kream »

user5994461 wrote: post #176
brightball wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interested to get your opinion on Puppet/Ansible/Chef/CFEngine/SaltStack

CFEngine is basic text manipulation, it's not comparable to the rest. Puppet and Chef was the first generation. I wouldn't recommend. All the companies and people I know using Chef migrated away from it after many disasters. Nowadays, it's only mentioned in interviews to find out if candidates have real world fire fighting experiences. Ansible is good. Used that for managing hundreds of machines at multiple jobs (som…

> Ansible is great. Used that for management hundreds of machines at multiple jobs. It's been bought by RedHat, it's well maintained and I think it will have the brightest long term future.

A lot of folks I know have been bitten by Ansible's performance (Ansible has a central master that runs recipes on each node, rather than having nodes "pull" from a central master).

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

#182

Post by mcguire »

digi_owl wrote: post #171
notyourday wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put devs on 24x7 escalation above your level-1 ("Is it actually broken?") NOC. Developer attitude would change immediately.

Sadly i have seen far too many devs go "you are holding it wrong"...

"It works for me."

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

#183

Post by kazen44 »

user5994461 wrote: post #176
brightball wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interested to get your opinion on Puppet/Ansible/Chef/CFEngine/SaltStack

CFEngine is basic text manipulation, it's not comparable to the rest. Puppet and Chef was the first generation. I wouldn't recommend. All the companies and people I know using Chef migrated away from it after many disasters. Nowadays, it's only mentioned in interviews to find out if candidates have real world fire fighting experiences. Ansible is good. Used that for managing hundreds of machines at multiple jobs (som…

> Not sure about SaltStack. Never had the opportunity to try. I'd be a bit worried though on the long term prospect because I don't think they have much backing or user base.

saltstack is a well thoughout solution in my opinion. It makes more logical sense and is less of a mumbled mess then either chef or puppet and has miles better performance then ansible.

I know quite a few shops who use it. Its definitly smaller then ansible.

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

#184

Post by pc86 »

ProAm wrote: post #10
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!"

In reality it's all peachy until stuff doesn't work and no one knows why, or how to investigate an issue or remotely where to begin to troubleshoot it. Change and evolution is good, but I think there is still a lot to be said about knowing the basics to anything. Levels of abstractions eventually hurt more than it helps.

> Levels of abstractions eventually hurt more than it helps.

This is just not true, otherwise everyone would need to know ASM or be able to easily contract someone who does.

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

#185

Post by mcguire »

zodiac wrote: post #89
megaman22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've uses my fair share of build tools and I think makefiles are horrible. Stringly typed, ad-hoc features, and a really bad language from a PL perspective. Writing good build systems is genuinely hard, and I think make is not a good build system.

It is, unfortunately, better than most of its successors, at least in terms of generality.

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

#186

Post by preordained »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #119
ebiester wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a makefile from scratch. My challenge to you: I want a makefile that has 20 third party dependencies and can be built on osx, linux, and windows. I can do this within an hour with gradle, ant, or maven. The ecosystem doesn't exist for this in make, and anything I could come up with to make it possible would end up being a tool that would look like automake and the monstrosity that it entails.

"osx, linux, and windows" and you've already made sure they are running the same JRE version, right?

Come on...bundle your JRE. I don't know why anyone wouldn't in the age of terabyte hard drives and ubiquitous "small" apps with sizes that make a bundled JRE with all the trimmings look lightweight.

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

#187

Post by mcguire »

Joeri wrote: post #61
megaman22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many of these are tools which download code dependencies from package repositories and integrate them into a codebase or build. Make doesn’t do that, even configure doesn’t do that.

Anyone remember the days when you didn't want to do that?

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

#188

Post by scurvy »

hodgesrm wrote: post #11

I see this as more of an opportunity than a problem. The fact that Hadoop, Kubernetes, and other platform-like systems are complex to manage properly with good attention to security implies they should be delivered as cloud services rather than having everyone run their own. This enables K8s users to focus on apps while offloading management to specialists who can focus on running the services well. If you operating…

One of the gating factors here is the both the speed of Kubernetes development (move fast and break all the things), and the terrible state of accompanying documentation.

If "they should be delivered as cloud services" is some sort of k8s apologist stance for its sorry state of maturity, then we got issues. OTOH, if it's "You shouldn't run it in house unless you have an army of people to read every new commit", that's wrong, too.

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

#189

Post by Twirrim »

spiderjerusalem wrote: post #149
ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #63

Ex Amazon here. Most grumpy system engineers did not disappear: we got hired by Google/Amazon/etc to build large-scale infrastructure... and sometimes sell it back to you as a service. Believe me or not, most of the underlying infra does not run on the popular technology of the year. Far, far from it. That's why it works. Modern devops, with its million tools that break backward compatibility every month sometimes be…

What fascinates me about this is, and sorry for being morbid, but what happens when y'all die? Does knowledge of the lower levels of the stack go away with your generation, or will there be enough of us young ones picking the important stuff up?

There's rarely anything old school sysadmins have learned that hasn't come from experience.

Been there, done that, fought that shit the first time. And the second. And the third. (it's amazing how often I find myself solving what are essentially the same problems over and over.) It's one reason why you'll find we'll push back on the "ohh shiny". There are many wonderful and fascinating things coming out. Tech is an amazing field to be working in. But it's also ridiculously frustrating because no one pays any attention to _why_ things are done the way they are, or _why_ approaches haven't worked in the past (I'm all for re-introducing past failed approaches, as long as there's evidence those reasons have been investigated)

You'll find a common trend amongst us in that most of us sort of ended up in the role accidentally. Schools and college teach you to become developers. Few people tend to head to college with the view of specialising in the ops side of things.

Even speaking as a comparatively old-school sysadmin, my strengths come from being flexible and adaptable. What I do today is nothing like what I was doing 5 years ago, and what I did then is nothing like what I was doing 5 years before that, and so on down the line. The field is constantly in flux.

I just have the best part of two decades of experience to both anticipate the problems, and be able to get to diagnosis quicker when things do go wrong.

Even as the older sysadmins die off I'm fairly confident there will be newer ones to replace them, because people are going to continue to learn from the problems they run in to.

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

#190

Post by bassman9000 »

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #63

Ex Amazon here. Most grumpy system engineers did not disappear: we got hired by Google/Amazon/etc to build large-scale infrastructure... and sometimes sell it back to you as a service. Believe me or not, most of the underlying infra does not run on the popular technology of the year. Far, far from it. That's why it works. Modern devops, with its million tools that break backward compatibility every month sometimes be…

That's why it works.

Touché. Remember, there's value in battletested and proven, e.g. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-satellites-use-old-processors

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