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The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

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Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#81

Post by gaius »

pc86 wrote: post #5

> None of these "fancy" tools still builds by a traditional make command. Is there anything more "get-off-my-lawn" than "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

Old way: we have one tool, it’s got a few quirks but it does most of what we want and then gets out of the way. Noone is impressed by this, tools are supposed to just work aren’t they?

New way: we have a dozen tools, they collectively do less than the old one and integrating them is a full time job for someone since any upgrade breaks something. But we all get to put the names of all of these things on our CVs! And that’s what’s important.

I wish I was kidding.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#82

Post by weaksauce »

adamc wrote: post #51
eropple wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makefiles aren't scary. But they're also not particularly good. I use Rake (or Gulp, or whatever) because then I can use Ruby (or JavaScript, or whatever). Shell plumbing is fine for informal and small-scale stuff, and I make my code conform if somebody down the line (who may be me) wants to get out their duct tape, but the world is more complex than what /bin/sh can see. Shell is the lowest common denominator. Expec…

Your second paragraph got to the heart of it. If we want to use some standard build toolchain, it needs to use a nice language and not feel obscure. I was explaining to someone a bash script I wrote, and he said "why not use Python". There were reasons but... he was right, Python would be much easier to use and maintain, and we have a lot more developers who know it. That said, Maven is incredibly suck-tastic.

What reasons? I did some ruby shell automation and it’s dead simple to get it working and working correctly. I imagine python has a similar story.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#83

Post by untog »

kazen44 wrote: post #75
untog wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I just don't understand why we have to have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems > Everyone repeat after me. I don't mean to pick on you specifically here because this attitude comes up a lot. In short, a lot of people are doing a thing, a thing that you aren't familiar with, and your gut reaction is to say "everyone: stop doing that, and do what I say!". Wait a second and consider that maybe there is a…

> Wait a second and consider that maybe there is a reason why this incredibly large number of developers are using these tools. That perhaps they evaluated various different options and decided that what they are using is more suitable than make. Maybe you could find out. Here we have another fundemental "problem" between dev and ops. The inherent friction because of different areas of concern. Dev's want to build fa…

Not really? A lot of build tools are chosen specifically to make the build process more reliable and understandable. For example, build tools like Maven handle dependency management, which is hugely beneficial in ensuring your builds are consistent and work the same in different environments. Makefiles are shell scripts.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#84

Post by gaius »

eropple wrote: post #19
megaman22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I just don't understand why we have to have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems or job runners or whatever the new fad term is for every language, when there's something that does what they all do, is battle-tested, and has been around for decades. Everyone repeat after me. Makefiles are not scary. I can write a shell script. Do I really need to learn grunt/gulp/webpack/npm/rake/fake/maven/gradle/ant and…

Makefiles aren't scary. But they're also not particularly good. I use Rake (or Gulp, or whatever) because then I can use Ruby (or JavaScript, or whatever). Shell plumbing is fine for informal and small-scale stuff, and I make my code conform if somebody down the line (who may be me) wants to get out their duct tape, but the world is more complex than what /bin/sh can see. Shell is the lowest common denominator. Expec…

But they're also not particularly good.

Million+ line codebases got errm made with make. In my experience people most sneering at it have far lesser demands on their tool...

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#85

Post by kazen44 »

tw1010 wrote: post #52

Isn't this just an example of automation? Other than sunk cost, by what argument is it reasonable that the sysadmin job should in any way deserve to be protected or aught to continue to be a thing? To my ears containers sounds like they've kind of solved the problem.

How have containers solved maintaining production systems?

It's just moving the abstraction layer higher up the stack.

Also, who will design and build security for these systems? Or care about low-level performance?

A ton of dev's don't care about prod in my experience, and just want to ship shiny features.

Containers and VM's are not very different from a deployment or maintance standpoint. The deployment strategies used with containers could be done with (lightweight) VM's a decade ago. (heck, jails have been used for nearly 25 years)

Also, sysadmins have been automating stuff since forever. Without automation one inherently has a very unstable system.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#87

Post by jiveturkey »

megaman22 wrote: post #14
pc86 wrote: post #5

> None of these "fancy" tools still builds by a traditional make command. Is there anything more "get-off-my-lawn" than "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

But I just don't understand why we have to have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems or job runners or whatever the new fad term is for every language, when there's something that does what they all do, is battle-tested, and has been around for decades. Everyone repeat after me. Makefiles are not scary. I can write a shell script. Do I really need to learn grunt/gulp/webpack/npm/rake/fake/maven/gradle/ant and…

careful, your dinosaur scales are showing.

make is so bad you need automake to manage it.

there are much better tools. sadly, nothing LCD (least common denominator) so as to gain wide traction.

That said, for anyone distributing software, shame on them for not packaging their custom build so as to be runnable via ‘make all’ (just using make to drive everything else).

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#89

Post by zodiac »

megaman22 wrote: post #14
pc86 wrote: post #5

> None of these "fancy" tools still builds by a traditional make command. Is there anything more "get-off-my-lawn" than "These tools don't use the thing I like!"

But I just don't understand why we have to have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems or job runners or whatever the new fad term is for every language, when there's something that does what they all do, is battle-tested, and has been around for decades. Everyone repeat after me. Makefiles are not scary. I can write a shell script. Do I really need to learn grunt/gulp/webpack/npm/rake/fake/maven/gradle/ant and…

I've uses my fair share of build tools and I think makefiles are horrible. Stringly typed, ad-hoc features, and a really bad language from a PL perspective.

Writing good build systems is genuinely hard, and I think make is not a good build system.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

#90

Post by Fritsdehacker »

I work for a hosting company and we host our own Openstack based public cloud. We have a hard demand that for production systems we build all binaries we use from source. We actually build these in docker and use that to deploy to production.

What I'm trying to say is that the one doesn't exclude the other.

And we actually use make quite extensively.

I do however see the ops point, building from source hasn't gotten easier.

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