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As a senior sysadmin who has had to deal with all the crap devs throw at me, I skipped the container craze to focus on VM security and other issues. Give the de

As a senior sysadmin who has had to deal with all the crap devs throw at me, I skipped the container craze to focus on VM security and other issues. Give the devs a nice powerful boxen to use (APIs in many hypervisors these days)so they can do the provisioning themselves. Without all the added complexity another tooling like docker requires. Real world benchmarks I ran indicated perf differences were negligible, so devs seem to mostly like docker cause they don't have to do sysadmin stuff... but I can do all the same things in a VM, plus much more. A big shoutout to the people at Proxmox while I'm at it.

rconti 9y ago
Also a sysadmin, I've inevitably found that the environment needs/expects a number of services, and it just feels like docker is ill-suited to these use cases. Frequently even the devs themselves want multiple services and can't tolerate stateless systems anyway, but at the very least we have to deal with logging and the like. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I've never found a developer who had a particular desire to implement containers, and even if they did, their concerns don't represent the entirety of what's involved in running infrastructure.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  I feel like the increase in devs in general and in business have made them more likely to follow bandwagons and fads more easily than they used to, which just makes our job harder.
tootie 9y ago
You mean like some private cloud software? I'm in this same boat from the dev side trying to negotiate a sustainable option that doesn't slow us down.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  Forget the word cloud. The cloud exists on servers. What you are talking about is servers. I mean build a nice beefy 2 cpu supermicro rackmountable 2-4u server with a shitton of RAM and fast disks and a duplicate for HA which is then backed up properly. It is a dev and a sysadmins playground paradise. I do prefer to keep prod and dev on separate physical machines though for an added layer of separation. One more thing. People seem to think colocation isn't worth it anymore... well let me tell you, they are very often wrong! Colo is a great solution depending on the problem. You get the closeness to the core backbone nodes, the security of a DC, and these days often at very competitive prices. You can get security cages, full racks or you can half racks and sometimes the DC has smaller etc to keep the cost down as well. If thats not an option, you can do dedicated servers in a DC. The difference being in a colo the hardware is yours, in a dedicated setup the hardware is part of an offering by the provider. I have done this at many places as a stopgap until the colo server arrives (rackspace for example). I would really suggest for real dev where you are compiling often and doing many things that stress systems, stay away from VPS's. It's not nice to other users and you don't get the perf you need/want anyway. This kind of stuff is what makes me excited about 32core amd cpu's on the way. This time I wont have to do a quad cpu system to get 64 cores, just 2! https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/EPYC7000/H11DSi.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/EPYC7000/H11DSi...

rconti 9y ago

Also a sysadmin, I've inevitably found that the environment needs/expects a number of services, and it just feels like docker is ill-suited to these use cases. Frequently even the devs themselves want multiple services and can't tolerate stateless systems anyway, but at the very least we have to deal with logging and the like. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I've never found a developer who had a particular desire to implement containers, and even if they did, their concerns don't represent the entirety of what's involved in running infrastructure.

arca_vorago 9y ago
I feel like the increase in devs in general and in business have made them more likely to follow bandwagons and fads more easily than they used to, which just makes our job harder.

tootie 9y ago

You mean like some private cloud software? I'm in this same boat from the dev side trying to negotiate a sustainable option that doesn't slow us down.

arca_vorago 9y ago
Forget the word cloud. The cloud exists on servers. What you are talking about is servers. I mean build a nice beefy 2 cpu supermicro rackmountable 2-4u server with a shitton of RAM and fast disks and a duplicate for HA which is then backed up properly. It is a dev and a sysadmins playground paradise. I do prefer to keep prod and dev on separate physical machines though for an added layer of separation. One more thing. People seem to think colocation isn't worth it anymore... well let me tell you, they are very often wrong! Colo is a great solution depending on the problem. You get the closeness to the core backbone nodes, the security of a DC, and these days often at very competitive prices. You can get security cages, full racks or you can half racks and sometimes the DC has smaller etc to keep the cost down as well. If thats not an option, you can do dedicated servers in a DC. The difference being in a colo the hardware is yours, in a dedicated setup the hardware is part of an offering by the provider. I have done this at many places as a stopgap until the colo server arrives (rackspace for example). I would really suggest for real dev where you are compiling often and doing many things that stress systems, stay away from VPS's. It's not nice to other users and you don't get the perf you need/want anyway. This kind of stuff is what makes me excited about 32core amd cpu's on the way. This time I wont have to do a quad cpu system to get 64 cores, just 2! https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/EPYC7000/H11DSi.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/EPYC7000/H11DSi...