Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

Kubernetes is one of those things that are only as complicated as you want it to be.

The problem with Kubernetes and complexity is that because it simplifies a lot of things that are a huge PITA to accomplish on a "homemade" server/container setup is that there are a huge number of products and things you can run on kubernetes to "do stuff".

And it is hard for a lot of people and organizations to resist the "oh shiny" aspect. Stuff like "Oh, look I can do network policies and service meshes!" or "Lets create this really complicated and big thing so we can configure all our AWS infrastructure with kubernetes objects! Who cares that a bad commit can destroy the infrastructure the cluster depends on along with our ability to manage any of it!" or "Look we can have lots of namespaces for all our internal orgs and departments, lets make a gigantic centrally managed Kubernetes cluster that will be managed by IT and that everybody will be forced to use at the same time! Putting all our eggs in one basket is a awesome idea!".

K8s sorta removes the barrier of entry that world normally stop people from implementing those sorts of bad ideas.

Otherwise the core vanilla Kubernetes isn't really that complicated compared to most DIY solutions that try to manage large numbers of apps on clusters of systems. Most of the time it ends up a lot more robust and simpler in the right hands.

It’s like driving a car. Most people can drive without needing to understand the internals, and it’ll still get them from point A to B. But just like some people enjoy diving deep into car mechanics, others enjoy understanding the intricacies of software.

For me, that deeper knowledge is an advantage. It helps me quickly evaluate tradeoffs between databases, debug at the OS level, or dismiss a library still relying on select if I expect heavy load. This insight saves time and increases efficiency.

> So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners [...] It is time people in IT got to understand this

I understand it alright, but I'm trapped. Closer to 50 than to 40, I've got a family to run. I could be interested in another profession, but our daily lives & savings would tank if I stopped working, for learning another profession. Also, there's no other profession that I could realistically learn that would let me take nearly the same amount of money home every month. If someone lives alone, they could adjust their standard of living (-> downwards, of course); how do you do that for a family?

Furthermore, there is no switchover between "soulless software job for $$$" and "inspiring software job for $". There are only soulless jobs, only the $ varies. Work sucks absolutely everywhere; the only variable is compensation -- at best we can get one that "sucks less".

When I was a teenager, I could have never dreamt that programming would devolve into such a cruel daily grind for me. Mid-life crisis does change how we look at things, doesn't it. We want more meaning to our work (society has extremely decoupled livelihood from meaning), but there's just no way out. Responsibilities, real or imaginary, keep us trapped. I'd love to reboot my professional life, but the risks are extreme.

FWIW, I still appreciate interesting tasks at work; diving into the details lets me forget, at least for a while, how meaningless it all is.

I'm surprised no one is talking about FreeNAS / TrueNAS and their interesting history in this area in the comments.

There's probably more collective writing about the various tradeoffs between Debian and FreeBSD in their forums and communities than anywhere else on the internet.

Personally I love ZFS and ZFS on root so much I can never go back to not having it. It's a shame more cloud providers like DigitalOcean/AWS/etc. don't offer it natively.

> The abstractions that people add make things more complex, not less

Everything in our industry is built on abstractions.

By your logic we shouldn't be using operating systems, compilers, libraries etc and writing our own custom software to manually move applications between different hosts if they go down.