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I have built a lot of stuff on kubernetes. Outside of certain edge cases I've had to use almost none of the actual system administration knowledge I have. The v

I have built a lot of stuff on kubernetes. Outside of certain edge cases I've had to use almost none of the actual system administration knowledge I have. The vast majority of things are relatively simple, or can be handled via a nice UI provided by <cloud_provider_here>. In fact, I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed. It was a huge boon for businesses that would otherwise have to pay both developers and sysadmins. Now they can pay one of them half the value! The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers. For example, AWS makes setting up a network topology/compute/etc very easy. Sometimes these tasks are handled by SRE, a lot of times they are handled again by developers. Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism to get things started (with the subsequent pitfalls).

antonvs 4y ago
> Now they can pay one of them half the value! They’re paying the other half of the value to the cloud provider, more or less. Ideally, perhaps a bit less. But that’s how business works. The cloud provider is operating these systems much better than 99+% of companies could hope to do.
p_l 4y ago
As someone who gravitated to sysadmin side (it was easier to get work than AI, especially if you grew banging together components to get a working desktop since 1990s)... k8s is a great lever for sysadmin. It's the kind of tool we spoke of in fevered tones when we shared legends of "automating our job so we would only need to pick they paycheck". Does it mean there's less need for absolute Ops-side numbers? Sure. Did we have the numbers before? hahaha, fat chance, nope. So in my experience, moving onto k8s often means my job involves less understaffing now, less panic, and less cursing. Most importantly, less reasons to visit Scary Devil Monastery (alt.sysadmin.recovery). And if the low amount of work starts to get depressing... you can always take another job[1] or start engineering the shit out of the infrastructure. Bonus points if you make it without making it problem for future you (so documentation and the like) and without raising costs. [1] A polish joke about sysadmins: "Hey, Joe lost a job, you heard?" "How can he deal with having only 5 full time jobs?"
pxc 4y ago
> I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed. It was a huge boon for businesses that would otherwise have to pay both developers and sysadmins. Now they can pay one of them half the value! > The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers Yes. There is a word for this process: deskilling — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling It is typically followed or accompanied by a loss of autonomy and/or other privileges in the workplace
sgarland 4y ago
> a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed I've yet to meet a dev who knows how or wants to create and maintain the IaC to manage the infra. > Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism Understanding Terraform's limitations and being able to work around it in a way that is both readable and scalable is most definitely not brainless. Sure, I can write some .tf files to spin up an EKS cluster pretty easily. Load balancer? I can also do that in Terraform, or I can let the cluster manage its own. Uh-oh, a fork. Which one is better? What if I want to have multiple AWS accounts; how do I properly delegate IAM permissions across them? Etc.
- Test0129 4y ago
  In my experience once terraform moves beyond "brainless script" it becomes a massive footgun. Completely unexpected, unintuitive behavior can happen that destroys an entire cluster. You're often better at that point legitimately paying for an SRE team to manage things but "move fast and break things" tends to prefer detonating a cluster over paying professionals.

antonvs 4y ago

> Now they can pay one of them half the value! They’re paying the other half of the value to the cloud provider, more or less. Ideally, perhaps a bit less. But that’s how business works. The cloud provider is operating these systems much better than 99+% of companies could hope to do.

p_l 4y ago

As someone who gravitated to sysadmin side (it was easier to get work than AI, especially if you grew banging together components to get a working desktop since 1990s)... k8s is a great lever for sysadmin. It's the kind of tool we spoke of in fevered tones when we shared legends of "automating our job so we would only need to pick they paycheck". Does it mean there's less need for absolute Ops-side numbers? Sure. Did we have the numbers before? hahaha, fat chance, nope. So in my experience, moving onto k8s often means my job involves less understaffing now, less panic, and less cursing. Most importantly, less reasons to visit Scary Devil Monastery (alt.sysadmin.recovery). And if the low amount of work starts to get depressing... you can always take another job[1] or start engineering the shit out of the infrastructure. Bonus points if you make it without making it problem for future you (so documentation and the like) and without raising costs. [1] A polish joke about sysadmins: "Hey, Joe lost a job, you heard?" "How can he deal with having only 5 full time jobs?"

pxc 4y ago

> I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed. It was a huge boon for businesses that would otherwise have to pay both developers and sysadmins. Now they can pay one of them half the value! > The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers Yes. There is a word for this process: deskilling — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling It is typically followed or accompanied by a loss of autonomy and/or other privileges in the workplace

sgarland 4y ago

> a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed I've yet to meet a dev who knows how or wants to create and maintain the IaC to manage the infra. > Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism Understanding Terraform's limitations and being able to work around it in a way that is both readable and scalable is most definitely not brainless. Sure, I can write some .tf files to spin up an EKS cluster pretty easily. Load balancer? I can also do that in Terraform, or I can let the cluster manage its own. Uh-oh, a fork. Which one is better? What if I want to have multiple AWS accounts; how do I properly delegate IAM permissions across them? Etc.

Test0129 4y ago
In my experience once terraform moves beyond "brainless script" it becomes a massive footgun. Completely unexpected, unintuitive behavior can happen that destroys an entire cluster. You're often better at that point legitimately paying for an SRE team to manage things but "move fast and break things" tends to prefer detonating a cluster over paying professionals.