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Listen, you are entirely right, but in a backward-looking way. The entire industry is moving in the direction of lambdas/functions and containers. The value of

Listen, you are entirely right, but in a backward-looking way. The entire industry is moving in the direction of lambdas/functions and containers. The value of OS support is racing toward irrelevancy.

mroche 7y ago
Which industry, there’s no blanket all-encompassing “industry”? There are still those who don’t live purely the web. Every place I’ve worked at has used RHEL (public university and Film/VFX/animation), and it’s for the exact reasons as written above and sibling/child comments. Do we integrate with/use cloud and container solutions for services that align with that? Yep. But you can’t just dismiss the foundation, no matter how recursively down the chain you need to go, that it all runs on just because you don’t have to deal with it (“you” in the general sense).
- all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  The IT industry. Companies that aren't primarily focused on technology tend to lag years behind the tech sector with tech adoption, but they follow eventually.
  - jm4 7y ago
    Not really. At least not always. No offense, but you sound like someone relatively new to IT (as in a few to several years). Stay in this field long enough and you see history repeating itself. After you witness a few cycles you will have a completely different perspective. Some of these companies - I’m excluding the ones that are just hopelessly out of date and out of touch - simply have different needs. This is especially true when a significant portion of the tech - maybe the majority - faces inward. There’s not much value in elastic cloud computing when your workload is relatively stable over a period of years and it’s running a bunch of back office stuff that’s not part of your company’s product.
    - all_blue_chucks 7y ago
      20 years in tech at leading companies here. Nobody is building new workloads on the old model. I'm not talking about fad following startups here. It is a simplification to the point of being wrong to say everything in tech is cyclical. Some things are in some ways, but for the most part we progress forward, not back. You seem old and out of touch. No offense. But when people aren't able to keep up they sometimes invent fantasies that their skills will remain relevant forever. That's never really been true unless you actively search out confirmation bias and ignore the vast majority of what's happening in the field.
      - jm4 7y ago
        I stand by my previous comment. I was like you once, thinking everyone else who isn’t on the bleeding edge is an out of touch idiot with an outdated, irrelevant skill set. There’s a time and a place. It really depends on your requirements. Maybe your experience has been more focused so that you haven’t had to deal with much with more diverse requirements. Or maybe you’re not the guy on the hot seat who risks budget, company performance and people’s jobs with tech decisions. Call me a dinosaur. I don’t care. I use the right tool for the job whether it’s new or not.
majewsky 7y ago
> The entire industry is moving in the direction of lambdas/functions and containers. So you're not running a kernel anymore? Interesting. The main reason why I've seen people at $WORK interact with Red Hat or Suse support is to figure out weird kernel behaviors (both actual kernel bugs and also what turned out to be suboptimal configuration). Also, do you run your desktop Linux in containers? Desktop Linux is certainly a smaller market than server Linux, but it's large enough for Red Hat to service it.
- all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  Somebody owns the bottom of the stack, but that is a smaller and smaller number of people.

mroche 7y ago

Which industry, there’s no blanket all-encompassing “industry”? There are still those who don’t live purely the web. Every place I’ve worked at has used RHEL (public university and Film/VFX/animation), and it’s for the exact reasons as written above and sibling/child comments. Do we integrate with/use cloud and container solutions for services that align with that? Yep. But you can’t just dismiss the foundation, no matter how recursively down the chain you need to go, that it all runs on just because you don’t have to deal with it (“you” in the general sense).

all_blue_chucks 7y ago
The IT industry. Companies that aren't primarily focused on technology tend to lag years behind the tech sector with tech adoption, but they follow eventually.
- jm4 7y ago
  Not really. At least not always. No offense, but you sound like someone relatively new to IT (as in a few to several years). Stay in this field long enough and you see history repeating itself. After you witness a few cycles you will have a completely different perspective. Some of these companies - I’m excluding the ones that are just hopelessly out of date and out of touch - simply have different needs. This is especially true when a significant portion of the tech - maybe the majority - faces inward. There’s not much value in elastic cloud computing when your workload is relatively stable over a period of years and it’s running a bunch of back office stuff that’s not part of your company’s product.
  - all_blue_chucks 7y ago
    20 years in tech at leading companies here. Nobody is building new workloads on the old model. I'm not talking about fad following startups here. It is a simplification to the point of being wrong to say everything in tech is cyclical. Some things are in some ways, but for the most part we progress forward, not back. You seem old and out of touch. No offense. But when people aren't able to keep up they sometimes invent fantasies that their skills will remain relevant forever. That's never really been true unless you actively search out confirmation bias and ignore the vast majority of what's happening in the field.
    - jm4 7y ago
      I stand by my previous comment. I was like you once, thinking everyone else who isn’t on the bleeding edge is an out of touch idiot with an outdated, irrelevant skill set. There’s a time and a place. It really depends on your requirements. Maybe your experience has been more focused so that you haven’t had to deal with much with more diverse requirements. Or maybe you’re not the guy on the hot seat who risks budget, company performance and people’s jobs with tech decisions. Call me a dinosaur. I don’t care. I use the right tool for the job whether it’s new or not.

majewsky 7y ago

> The entire industry is moving in the direction of lambdas/functions and containers. So you're not running a kernel anymore? Interesting. The main reason why I've seen people at $WORK interact with Red Hat or Suse support is to figure out weird kernel behaviors (both actual kernel bugs and also what turned out to be suboptimal configuration). Also, do you run your desktop Linux in containers? Desktop Linux is certainly a smaller market than server Linux, but it's large enough for Red Hat to service it.

all_blue_chucks 7y ago
Somebody owns the bottom of the stack, but that is a smaller and smaller number of people.