why is this not required at interview for sysadmins?
it would up the status of the industry overnight if everyone was at this level...
Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
191–200 of 485 posts
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.
Not a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.
why you'd need 3 admins watching it 24/7?
____________
That's how I've seen it working in datacenter:
cheapest junior admins (450$/month) were having night shifts
and if something broke, then they were calling an engineer
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#193Full 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 certai…
I've used serverless on small personal projects where paying for a VPS or EC2 instance would be cost prohibitive, e.g. would I really want to pay $5/mo for a small throwaway weekend project? Probably not.
But what if the cost is $.0001 per request? It becomes a very convenient way to make all of my personal projects permanently accessible by hosting on S3 + Lambda.
Even in large workloads it makes sense. Much of AWS is migrating from instances to AWS Lambda. There are some workloads where persistent instances make sense, but a lot of common use cases are perfect for Lambda or similar serverless technologies.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ru…
> ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig That's just a cronjob. I know some people don't like doing it that way, but that's on them. I've seen this work for years in production with minimal trouble.
It’s not even a cron job. It’s a single apt install.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.
Not a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.
[deleted]
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.
Around here, you'd spread the work of one new server to folks you've already got or spread the cost of new hires to a large number of servers. I think it's also worth considering that many outfits wouldn't get good value from the 24/365 coverage you propose and don't care to pay for it.
Or you'd hire an MSP. Having a full time employee is a greater level of service than anyone here is getting from a cloud provider. Lots of folks can get by with an admin who stops in once or twice a week, or remotes in and takes care of the daily tasks on largely a part-time basis.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.
Not a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.
[deleted]
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here's what the bare metal server didn't come with: [bunch of stuff I don't need] Exactly. Imagine paying for all that when all you need is bare metal. Now imagine paying for all that just because you've read on the Internet that it's best practice and that's what the big guys do. Way back the best practice was what Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco wanted you to buy. Now it's what Amazon wants you to buy. Buy what you ne…
I am buying IaaS it is so nice to use VPS with snapshots every 4 hours that I don't have to think about. I don't care where those snapshots are stored and how much space those take. In case I need to restore my IaaS provider gives me 2-click option to restore - one to click restore and 2nd to confirm. I sit and watch progress. I also don't care about hardware replacement and anything that connects to that. I have to…
Snapshots every 4 hours? That doesn't sound impressive at all. In 2022 that's laptop tier capability.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#199I have over 20 years of Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin experience ranging from universities to major silicon valley companies in both cloud and on-prem. When it comes to companies I mostly support cloud these days but when it comes to me and my family I accept every downside and host as almost all of our digital lives in a 42u rack in a gutted closet in our house with static IPs and business fiber. I know where our data live…
Just curious, what data do you worry about a warrant for? Asking to protect my own data.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#200I have over 20 years of Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin experience ranging from universities to major silicon valley companies in both cloud and on-prem. When it comes to companies I mostly support cloud these days but when it comes to me and my family I accept every downside and host as almost all of our digital lives in a 42u rack in a gutted closet in our house with static IPs and business fiber. I know where our data live…
I'm in a similar boat. I had a server in a closet but switched to a NAS a few years ago and haven't looked back. I do run into people who thinks NAS is old hat, that everything should be backed to a cloud somewhere. These are the people who think they are watching 4k because they select that option on youtube. I want to watch 4k without buffering, without artifacts. NAS lets me do that. And when I go away for a few d…
I also prefer 480p with a good scenario than a 4k-60fps turd of the past 15 years. Still manage to have a hundred movie or so below a TB.