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> The problem for me with the old big-server-many-apps approach is the way it becomes hard to manage. 5 years on, I know that I did a bunch of things for a bunc

by Jedd 8y ago

> The problem for me with the old big-server-many-apps approach is the way it becomes hard to manage. 5 years on, I know that I did a bunch of things for a bunch of reasons, but I don't really remember what or why. I thought this was a solved problem. I use SaltStack for config management & orchestration on my own machines. (I suggest any config management tool becomes 'worth the effort' once you're managing more than a handful of machines, and/or want to rebuild or spin up new machines with minimal effort and surprises more than once a year.) Why I do something is described in a comment in the yaml that does the something. For more nuanced situations, I'll document it in my wiki. (With a yaml comment pointing to same -- I am extremely pessimistic about future-Jedd's ability to remember things.) If you're running a big-server-many-apps or many-servers-with-their-own-apps, I'd expect the same approach to work equally well. Though the whole idea of virtual servers & config management (but not necessarily docker or k8s) is that you don't have a bunch of disparate and potentially conflicting apps with potentially conflicting dependencies on a single server. > But "virtual server" is like "horseless carriage". The term itself indicates that some transition is happening, but that we don't really understand it yet. That's a challenging assertion to fully unpack. IT's undeniably in a constant state of transition -- and not always thoughtfully directed -- but the problem isn't _'virtual server'_. The general trend is obviously towards isolation -- but the tooling, performance, scaling, design, and security disparities make the arguments around what level you try to implement your isolation so interesting.

wpietri 8y ago
I agree that "virtual server" isn't a problem. Neither was "horseless carriage" or "radio with pictures". All of them were steps forward. But they're transitional states on the way to new paradigms. When servers were expensive things that had full-time staff, the old ways of installing software made a lot of sense. But as server power got cheaper, they became impractical. A virtual server was at least familiar; slicing big machines up let us turn the clock back to when servers were less powerful. But that didn't really solve the problem, as we now had to do something to manage the explosion in the number of servers, real and virtual. Things like chef and puppet jumped in to solve this, but they are IMHO clumsy; it's all the work of managing a lot of servers the old way, even though it may be a small number of physical boxes. Containerization says: Forget about installing apps on servers; just wrap the app up with what it needs. Things like Kubernetes takes that further, saying: Don't worry about which apps are running on which servers; it'll just work. The impedance mismatch between modern hardware and the 1970s-university-department paradigm that underlies Unix gets solved automatically. I'm not sure if that's the end state in the paradigm shift. But I'm convinced that the approach to sysadminning I learned in the 1980s is on its way out.

by Jedd 8y ago

wpietri 8y ago

I agree that "virtual server" isn't a problem. Neither was "horseless carriage" or "radio with pictures". All of them were steps forward. But they're transitional states on the way to new paradigms. When servers were expensive things that had full-time staff, the old ways of installing software made a lot of sense. But as server power got cheaper, they became impractical. A virtual server was at least familiar; slicing big machines up let us turn the clock back to when servers were less powerful. But that didn't really solve the problem, as we now had to do something to manage the explosion in the number of servers, real and virtual. Things like chef and puppet jumped in to solve this, but they are IMHO clumsy; it's all the work of managing a lot of servers the old way, even though it may be a small number of physical boxes. Containerization says: Forget about installing apps on servers; just wrap the app up with what it needs. Things like Kubernetes takes that further, saying: Don't worry about which apps are running on which servers; it'll just work. The impedance mismatch between modern hardware and the 1970s-university-department paradigm that underlies Unix gets solved automatically. I'm not sure if that's the end state in the paradigm shift. But I'm convinced that the approach to sysadminning I learned in the 1980s is on its way out.