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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
An experienced software engineer (yeah, developer) has experience engineering software. It’s been less than 10yrs since the advent of containerized deployments, and the space has been fraught with change nearly on par with the front end JavaScript ecosystem. Might as well just stick to writing code. OK, that’s the perception of my own peers, but I assume it scales. DevOps is a recent advent, too, and sounds to me lik…
SRE was born of putting software engineers to work building operational software and automation tailored to an organization and application. In contrast, no matter what anyone says, DevOps was objectively born of replacing the operations discipline and career track with a poorly-understood tool economy and ongoing opex to a cloud provider. As you say, typical JavaScript engineers can’t be bothered to understand netwo…
This is a great post but I want to say that I feel there's space for both. IMO a DevOps Engineer would sit between the sysadmin/network folks and the developers who wants to be users of a system.
In my current gig we've moved from the DevOps department to the Platform department as it aligns more with what we are trying to provide. A Platform for developers.
That said we essentially can speak sysadmin and can speak developers. We trust sysadmins with network, linux image and more specialist topics. We make tools for both sides and try to make them work together often sitting in the middle and negotiating.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#23> A “container” is just a term people use to describe a combination of Linux namespaces and cgroups. Linux namespaces and cgroups ARE first class objects. NOT containers. Amen. Somewhat tangential note: most developers I have met do not understand what a 'container' is. There's an aura of magic and mystique around them. And a heavy emphasis on Docker. A sizable fraction will be concerned about 'container overhead' (a…
I feel nowadays containers generally refer to the concept, and cgroups and namespaces are the implementation details of a specific container runtime. These are very important implementation details for security and performance, but it doesn't fundamentally impact how you structure your containerized application. You can take the same container image, and run using Docker, Firecracker, gVisor, or many other container…
Agreed. The post feels a bit pedantic; I don't know any dev doing "cool things" with the underlying namespaces/cgroups. They're just using Docker. De-mystifying containers has value, but so does the abstraction.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
SRE was born of putting software engineers to work building operational software and automation tailored to an organization and application. In contrast, no matter what anyone says, DevOps was objectively born of replacing the operations discipline and career track with a poorly-understood tool economy and ongoing opex to a cloud provider. As you say, typical JavaScript engineers can’t be bothered to understand netwo…
This is a great post but I want to say that I feel there's space for both. IMO a DevOps Engineer would sit between the sysadmin/network folks and the developers who wants to be users of a system. In my current gig we've moved from the DevOps department to the Platform department as it aligns more with what we are trying to provide. A Platform for developers. That said we essentially can speak sysadmin and can speak d…
Call them SREs and cross-train SWEs into it. It’s not a toothless distinction even though it seems like one. You absolutely, positively will hire better staff with better deliverables if you frame the work as “a software engineer focused on operational integration,” which SRE understands more.
SREs like to build platforms for exactly the same reasons you’re touching. You sound like you’re halfway there already. I strongly suggest the Google book, with “I am not Google scale” written in Sharpie on the cover for help digesting it.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#25> A “container” is just a term people use to describe a combination of Linux namespaces and cgroups. Linux namespaces and cgroups ARE first class objects. NOT containers. Amen. Somewhat tangential note: most developers I have met do not understand what a 'container' is. There's an aura of magic and mystique around them. And a heavy emphasis on Docker. A sizable fraction will be concerned about 'container overhead' (a…
widespread in my experience; it reminds me to users of npm not seeming to understand what node is, for example.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#26> A “container” is just a term people use to describe a combination of Linux namespaces and cgroups. Linux namespaces and cgroups ARE first class objects. NOT containers. Amen. Somewhat tangential note: most developers I have met do not understand what a 'container' is. There's an aura of magic and mystique around them. And a heavy emphasis on Docker. A sizable fraction will be concerned about 'container overhead' (a…
Doesn't surprise me if I think about all the people who suddendly need a K8s cluster...
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most "DevOps" folks I know are actually former sysadmins who evolved to work more with cloud technologies. To say sysadmin hasn't evolved in a bit of an exaggeration. Titles follow the trend. What people actually do is often similar.
No, it isn’t an exaggeration. They ceded one particular competency, systems administrator, and now pay cloud providers to do it instead. The job didn’t go anywhere. Capacity planning, change management, peering, supply chain management, all of that stuff is still happening, they just willingly tapped out of it and took another job (probably because the DevOps people came in with a slide deck and hand waved them out o…
You still need to do capacity planning, change management, monitoring, etc. within your cloud environment. Those AWS instances and the software their running doesn't manage itself. For some subset of "cloud", such as PaaS providers like Heroku, etc., you are absolutely correct. For another subset of "cloud", you still need sysadmin / ops skills to manage it.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is widespread unfortunately. Developers changed to „users” and no longer pursue the details of solutions. Im not gonna say its the dominant behaviour in the field right now, but I see it more and more often on various experience levels.
You talk as if that's a bad thing. As a developer I don't want to wade into the details of systems I'm using, I want to spend my time writing code that solves the business problems I'm tasked with solving. If there is a system that allows me to do that by abstracting away the details I don't care about, why wouldn't I use that system?
Because frequently the devil is in the details.
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#29> A “container” is just a term people use to describe a combination of Linux namespaces and cgroups. Linux namespaces and cgroups ARE first class objects. NOT containers. Amen. Somewhat tangential note: most developers I have met do not understand what a 'container' is. There's an aura of magic and mystique around them. And a heavy emphasis on Docker. A sizable fraction will be concerned about 'container overhead' (a…
> To this day, I've heard CGroups being mentioned only once.
See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt
> "cgroup" stands for "control group" and is never capitalized. The singular form is used to designate the whole feature and also as a qualifier as in "cgroup controllers". When explicitly referring to multiple individual control groups, the plural form "cgroups" is used.
To this day, I've heard cgroup mentioned only once...
To put forth a more substantive argument, everybody has a layer of abstraction they do not peek under. You interviewed people that didn't peek under container. You went a layer deeper, but never peeked at the source tree to learn what cgroup really is. Does it really feel that much better to be one level above others?
Re: Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it isn’t an exaggeration. They ceded one particular competency, systems administrator, and now pay cloud providers to do it instead. The job didn’t go anywhere. Capacity planning, change management, peering, supply chain management, all of that stuff is still happening, they just willingly tapped out of it and took another job (probably because the DevOps people came in with a slide deck and hand waved them out o…
You still need to do capacity planning, change management, monitoring, etc. within your cloud environment. Those AWS instances and the software their running doesn't manage itself. For some subset of "cloud", such as PaaS providers like Heroku, etc., you are absolutely correct. For another subset of "cloud", you still need sysadmin / ops skills to manage it.
Yeah, you do. It’s a shame pretty much every single cloud-native shop in existence, you know, doesn’t bother, and pushes out the people arguing for bothering. I’ve been at this nearly two decades, and I have yet to find engineers even running an Excel notebook of inventory, much less capacity planning. You know, because describe-instances and monitoring and Ansible and Chef and blah blah.
My role right now is telling a major government agency how much they’re wasting on Azure. You know, because describe-instances. It’s a lot, and I think there might be a business model in “let me at your API for a week and give me 10%.” I’d be retired by Labor Day.
Reminder: They’re sending Congressionally appropriated funds. To Redmond. And they’re not entirely sure why, in $millions of cases. Line up fifty startups that have had a Demo Day and I’d bet you’d find the same thing in fifty-one of them.
That’s the DevOps legacy: don’t mind the budget, because AWS, Azure, and GCP have our financial interests in mind and APIs are cheaper to staff than fiber. Parades of like-minded individuals came to D.C. and said “DevOps! Do it!” and the agencies are now increasingly beholden to organizations incentivized by profit and those contractors took their Innovation Award check and don’t return the “um, what now?” calls. That’s the mess I’m trying to help clean up, and it’s happening across every major governmental organ in the United States.