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

vitavonni.de

191–200 of 435 posts

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

#191

This is definitely a rant that obscures the underlying point: the introduction of _untrusted_ or _unreliable_ network resources, frequently hidden in a string of dependencies. I'm baffled how often I see an someone throw this sort of craziness - "go fetch this thing from some random third party" - into very important places, such as the startup procedures of a container. It's something I see in a culture of the two p…

You know, I used to agree with you. But the reality is you have to weigh the massive productivity boosts that things like docker bring to the table vs. the potential issues it can bring. To a large degree, good perimeter security mitigates a lot of the concerns of containers themselves running slightly out of date software.

> To a large degree, good perimeter security mitigates a lot of the concerns of containers themselves running slightly out of date software.

this is a very naive way of setting up a secure production enviroment.

Your perimeter security is worthless if you are loading non public images which have malware or even worse, unknown malicious code in them.

having a data breach or hack on your hands is something which could kill the company. That risk is not worth having a slightly faster productivity boost because you or your ops team is not able or willing to build a proper private repository setup.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ansible has a very, very low barrier to entry. You go from 0 to 100 in a very short time. It makes a lot of sense to use it when you just begin building your infrastructure.

Later on you can run Ansible Tower, deploy Ansible agents everywhere, and basically use Ansible under the same client/server model like all the other tools.

Salt is eerily similar to Ansible, it's just geared towards client/server. Being experienced with Ansible, it was weird at first to use Salt because everything looked familiar, yet slightly different.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ansible has a pull mode that can be turned on. There are some trade-offs with it from the normal operating model, but it's there when you get large enough to need it.

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/ansible-pull.html

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

#194

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?

It's a legit concern. There was a NANOG panel about this exact thing. I believe the quote was, "Take a look around. We're all old and greying. We have a severe pipeline problem." And then much to AWS' dude's dismay, the topic shifted towards blaming cloud services because no one takes the time to learn how any of this works any more.

Want to guarantee your child's future employment? Don't just teach them to code (the machines will do that). Teach them how to build networks and truly understand network protocols.

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

#195
I think the entire statosphere of DevOps is just about dead on the whole in 2018 .. in retro, after working with things like Docker .. and more specific industry variations beyond the Amazon tech, it makes no sense to dwell on the security / control of a dedicated systems admin professional since the tools are all outside the local domain anyway. The rest from VoIP to IoT to container services are managed whole-sale .... SysAdmin is a dino in the age of distributed tech and outsourced IT resources.

I'm a programmer, so I'll take heat for it .. but I don't see a need for them anymore.

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

#196
I'm out! I'm done. I started as a developer. I then migrated to sysadmin, then systems engineer, then devops, and back to developer. I am done with playing the platform game. None of it matters. What matters is writing code that does work leading to profits. Always be coding. CAPEX over OPEX.

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

#198

This is definitely a rant that obscures the underlying point: the introduction of _untrusted_ or _unreliable_ network resources, frequently hidden in a string of dependencies. I'm baffled how often I see an someone throw this sort of craziness - "go fetch this thing from some random third party" - into very important places, such as the startup procedures of a container. It's something I see in a culture of the two p…

At the end of the day it comes down to the fact that businesses just simply don't care (Equifax etc).

They like the idea of security and that's where it ends.

In many places if you try to "do things right" you will get fired in two months for being too slow/strict and they will happily replace you with a clueless easily trusting person who "goes and fetches things from random third parties".

Many times they get lucky enough to survive and they don't appreciate the risks that they took. That pace becomes the expected norm and sets the theme in the industry.

And when shit hits the fan the PR person writes a "we are oh so very sorry .. security is totally our number one priority" blog post. They blame and fire the poor bastard and replace him with another warm body.

When it comes to these "hidden" things like security companies do not reward and also punish "doing things right" so on average and over the long term we end up where we are today.

When the culture sufficiently shifts towards being sloppy you will get hammered down quick if you try to be the voice of reason because it ends up being you vs everyone else (the norm).

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

#199
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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, per…

Also means fat fat contracting gigs for us luddites to clean up after the move-fast-break-shit-gtfo kids.

You know all those people who say, "Never rewrite a project! It'll always fail and take forever and cost too much and..."? I've spend much of the last decade getting paid reasonably well rewriting their projects. (Anyone remember mod_perl 1.x?)

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

#200
post #3

> And since nobody is still able to compile things from scratch, everybody just downloads precompiled binaries from random websites. Often without any authentication or signature. Apache has official mirrors that host repo files for various package managers so you can install using apt-get or whatever it is that replaced yum (dnf? dnf): https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/bigtop/bigtop-1.2.1/re... So precompiled bi…

I think the author's point was this: "Unless you compile it yourself, you can't trust it."

No, the point was "when you routinely use binaries from a bajillion different sources of varying degrees of trustworthiness, bad stuff is bound to happen".
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