Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

pietrorea.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 485 posts

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#31

Post by quickthrower2 »

> Compare this reality with cloud services. Building on top of them often feels like quicksand — they morph under you, quickly deprecate earlier versions and sometimes shut down entirely.

This rings true to me. On Azure anyway. Like the rest of tech you gotta keep up on the hamster wheel! Example: they canned Azure Container Services because of k8s - just imagine if you tightly integrated with that and now you meed to rewrite.

Also not mentioned in the article is cost. Hertzner is loved on HN for this reason.

That said k8s is probably a stable and competitive enough platform it makes a good tradeoff and by using it you invest in ops skills rather than specifically sys admin and I believe k8s skills will be long lasting and less fadish than proprietary vendor cloud skills.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#32

Post by marcosdumay »

akira2501 wrote: post #7
SkipperCat wrote: post #2

Time is money, and the more time I spend on infrastructure, the less time I spend on product. And thus is born the incredible demand of infrastructure as a service. Thankfully one person's cloud is another person's on prem infrastructure so sysadmin skills will always be in demand. From my perspective in enterprise computing, I now see people taking 2 paths. One where they become super deep sysadmins and work on infr…

That's when it clicked for me.. comparing my hourly salary rate vs. the cost of running these services "in the cloud." Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties was absolutely a net win for me and our team.

> Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties...

... and adding "cloud administration".

What is it with people doing completely one-sided analysis even when they experiment the thing by themselves? Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration? That's not my experience, so I'm quite interested on how it got so.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#33

Post by 28304283409234 »

akira2501 wrote: post #7
SkipperCat wrote: post #2

Time is money, and the more time I spend on infrastructure, the less time I spend on product. And thus is born the incredible demand of infrastructure as a service. Thankfully one person's cloud is another person's on prem infrastructure so sysadmin skills will always be in demand. From my perspective in enterprise computing, I now see people taking 2 paths. One where they become super deep sysadmins and work on infr…

That's when it clicked for me.. comparing my hourly salary rate vs. the cost of running these services "in the cloud." Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties was absolutely a net win for me and our team.

Counterintuitively, engineers that run their own servers and infra tend to gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to provide an actual running service to end users. And therefor they write software or at least there is better teamwork with "devops" infra folks.

This is off course the highly subjective meaning of a greybeard unixadmin.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#34

Post by warent »

When my SaaS app started scaling, I saw how badly cloud can be priced if you have even slightly unusual use-cases. It occurred to me that instead of spending ~$600/mo on GCP, I can invest in a $3000 PowerEdge server with much better hardware, run it out of my home office, and it pays for itself in less than a year.

Running your own server is an investment that doesn't make sense for everyone. If you can get it, it is better than you might imagine. Being in full control--the master of your own destiny--is so liberating and empowering. It feels the difference between constantly ordering Lyft/Uber/riding with friends, vs. owning your own car.

Not to mention, again, my hardware resources are so much better. This one server can run multiple profitable SaaS apps / businesses and still have room for experimental projects and market tests. Couldn't be happier with my decision to get off the cloud.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#35

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #32
akira2501 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's when it clicked for me.. comparing my hourly salary rate vs. the cost of running these services "in the cloud." Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties was absolutely a net win for me and our team.

> Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties... ... and adding "cloud administration". What is it with people doing completely one-sided analysis even when they experiment the thing by themselves? Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration? That's not my experience, so I'm quite interested on how it got so.

Too many of these people can't/won't/don't see past C-Panel.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#36

Post by LAC-Tech »

Full disclaimer, I'm very much not a sysadmin or devops guy.

However, every team I've been on recently has spent a lot of time struggling with gluing their AWS stuff together, diagnosing bugs etc. It didn't seem to save a heck of a lot of time at all.

I couldn't figure out AWS. But I could figure out how to host sites on a linux VPS.

So what's the story here - is serverless something that only makes sense at a certain scale? Because with tools like Caddy the 'old fashioned' way of doing seems really, really easy.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#37

Post by locusofself »

jvalencia wrote: post #20

Having scaled up various business initiatives, and working through countless scaling issues, I would recommend managed services like anyone else with experience... However! When I spin up my own side projects. It is sooo much easier to just go into the command line and spin something up directly --- it does make me wonder whether some small amount of expertise can really change things. By the time your orchestrating…

I totally agree. I recently set up a service using docker, terraform, and AWS fargate. It was interesting, but everything felt like such an abstraction. Firing up a VM and running the app would have taken me as little as 10 minutes vs a multiple day research project. Or using ansible would have taken maybe a couple hours.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#38

Post by [deleted] »

warent wrote: post #34

When my SaaS app started scaling, I saw how badly cloud can be priced if you have even slightly unusual use-cases. It occurred to me that instead of spending ~$600/mo on GCP, I can invest in a $3000 PowerEdge server with much better hardware, run it out of my home office, and it pays for itself in less than a year. Running your own server is an investment that doesn't make sense for everyone. If you can get it, it is…

[deleted]

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#39

Post by baybal2 »

warent wrote: post #34

When my SaaS app started scaling, I saw how badly cloud can be priced if you have even slightly unusual use-cases. It occurred to me that instead of spending ~$600/mo on GCP, I can invest in a $3000 PowerEdge server with much better hardware, run it out of my home office, and it pays for itself in less than a year. Running your own server is an investment that doesn't make sense for everyone. If you can get it, it is…

> it pays for itself in less than a year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13198157

On one meeting we had a typical discussion with ops guys:

- "why wouldn't we optimise our hardware utilisation by doing things a, b, and c."

- "hardware is crap cheap these days. If you need more capacity, just throw more servers at that"

- "is $24k a month in new servers crap cheap by your measure?"

- "comparatively to the amount of how much money these servers will make the same month, it is crap cheap. It is just a little less than an annual cost of mid-tier software dev in Russian office. We account only 12% increase in our revenue due to algorithmic improvements and almost 80 to more traffic we handle. A new server pays back the same month, and you and other devs pay off only in 2 years"

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#40

Post by jhickok »

marcosdumay wrote: post #32
akira2501 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's when it clicked for me.. comparing my hourly salary rate vs. the cost of running these services "in the cloud." Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties was absolutely a net win for me and our team.

> Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties... ... and adding "cloud administration". What is it with people doing completely one-sided analysis even when they experiment the thing by themselves? Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration? That's not my experience, so I'm quite interested on how it got so.

Can be. Paying for SaaS offerings like the gsuite or o365 is a great deal for say, 100 seats, instead of paying someone to administer on prem email. "Cloud administration" can be more work, less work, or about the same work as classic systems administration. That's why carefully running the numbers first should be necessary.
Post reply on HN