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I agree the last decade has been really tough for sysadmins, but the payoff is developers have had a great time and I dont have to rely on those guys any more.

• peterwwillis 7y ago
  This is a weird mentality that I think comes from being disconnected from ops. It's like you're a mechanical engineer building a truck, and now that you have a 3D Printer that can make any part, you think you don't have to rely on or communicate with the people driving the trucks on the road.
  • dividedbyzero 7y ago
    As long as what you're doing isn't too involved, I guess running without ops is completely realistic nowadays. If all you need is a database and a relatively simple monolithic app plus stuff like logging, metrics, and if a little downtime here and there isn't the end of the world, there's lots and lots of managed/cloud offerings that'll cut down ops to a point where it's very much manageable for capable devs. A lot of small shops run like this and do so successfully.
    • peterwwillis 7y ago
      If a little downtime here and there doesn't matter, then either customers don't care about the product, or the company doesn't care about the customer. Ops's job is to keep customers happy by keeping the applications from going down; it's not like they think a dev can't set up a service in AWS themselves. But you're right, you don't need a dedicated ops person if a dev has the time and knowledge to maintain a service reliably.
• opsthrowaway0 7y ago
  Flash bulletin from the engine room: you're still relying on "these guys" (and gals), you're just cost-sharing our salaries across whatever pile-o-garbage SaaS you convinced your architect to engage, including my own large cloud provider. Hint: it'd be more effective (and cheaper) to employ us directly, but you do you. That said, at the end of the day, I'm still sitting in my Aeron and your "great time" just means concentrating an entire discipline of professionals into cloud companies and ISPs. In this dream scenario (for who?), you get to sit around waiting for ticket updates while your revenue craters instead of picking up the phone or using that hole on your face to communicate with a peer. I get to focus on systems at scale and on monitoring and metrics instead of an annoying developer who escalates to their SVP and makes an inter-org ruckus when their TLS certificate expires and they can't find the error in their voluminous Javascript "logs". To be clear: I'm having a great time. There's a suspicious TAM in between me and you now, and you don't have my extension. I prayed for this day across many developer escalations and still can't believe it's here. Seriously, people who are likely replaceable with Microsoft Access and a few Thoughtworks clones shouldn't throw stones at the professions completely supporting their Blue Bottle habit. Oh yeah, the Internet keeps on quietly working, too. Tip jar is to your left.
  • finnthehuman 7y ago
    All the claims that cloud computing is some boon to developers makes me suspect they might just work at a terribly organized company. If you make developers pull double duty as sysadmins, then outsourcing surely makes things better for development. But it's still more work than handing the infrastructure and administration over to people that specialize in that. A well managed service is a ticket away, not getting someone who "knows docker pretty good" to have another background responsibility to neglect until it sets on fire. Throughout the cloud boom I've worked at a company with a great IT department, not just a glorified helpdesk. The division makes sure that we provide a sane deliverable that doesn't need constant handholding and 10 hotfixes a day, and they give us the peace of mind that it's not going to go sideways. They sweat the details so much that the rare issues that have escalated to the head of IT and myself at the same computer investigating something were still relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.