Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

They never suggested otherwise. They simply shared their current setup.

In my experience Pet servers are a good starting point (you really should _graduate_ from Pet servers into all the various immutable/cattle stuff), but it can quickly require discipline from the Admins.

They can't be doing one-off undocumented config, package, and network/firewall changes which make it impossible to setup another server reliably. At $company I moved us to Terraform+Packer (to get them used to immutable deploys, but still just an EC2 instance) then Pulumi+Docker+Fargate so we could fix our deployment velocity. The CTO was constantly afraid everything would break; mostly cause it actually would break all the time. Now basically anyone can deploy even if they're not a SysAdmin.

That's not to say you can't automate a Pet Server, but it's a lot more likely for someone to "just once" make some changes and now you don't trust your automation. In our case we had SaltStack and we were blocked by the CTO from running it unless it was off-hours/weekend.

None of the BSDs use bash in their base. Apple recently switched from bash to zsh. OpenBSD uses a descendent of pdksh.

Another major user of a pdksh descendent is Android (mksh), with a truly massive install base.

Some of the bash problem, besides portability, is GPLv3. That was a major factor for Apple. I don't want my script portability linked to corporate patent issues. For this and other reasons, I don't use bash-specific features, ever.

I don't know, abstraction is the name of the game and it makes my job 1000x easier. I have multiple servers running in my house that host everything from Plex to small little apps I've written, it all runs in containers and I couldn't be happier. Is being able to setup a Wordpress site with a script really something we should strive for?

I've always been a fan on "standing on the shoulders of giants" and it's served me very well to have this mindset. I'm fine to dive deep when I have to but diving deep just to dive deep.... not so much.

Semi-recently I had need of a simple blog for a friends/family thing, I spun up a wordpress and mysql container and was done. Over a decade ago I used to setup and manage wordpress installs but it's not a skill I need.

I find this article a little odd since they talk about server admin but then also scripting setup script for your server which is more in the "cattle" category for me and less in the "pet" that I would consider "server administration".

> Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration?

Infinitely, and if you look at it from a startup lens it only makes sense. One needs to point only at the recent log4j incident. This is obviously a gigantic black swan event, but even just ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig. There is absolutely no substitution for being able to ship code to a platform that just runs it and scales it for you.

Andy Jassey had a great slide a few years back at Reinvent, when talking about Lambda -- "in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic". If you really think about that: how many times have you had to write some kind of database sharding logic, or cache invalidation, or maintaining encrypted environment variables, whatever. That idea that you can toss that -- and what that gives to teams, not having to spend massive timesinks and budgets and hiring and all of that on -- effectively -- solved problems, you really start to understand how you can move faster.