5 ms·

Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd wa

by zo1 4y ago

Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.

HWR_14 4y ago
Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
  - alex_suzuki 4y ago
    Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
  - unregistereddev 4y ago
    On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
    - olddustytrail 4y ago
      I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      I have a rant here about security being mostly bullshit. Not even sysadmins can setup a server "in the most secure, maintainable manner". You don't hire a dedicated sys admin because they know some voodoo magic developers don't, you hire a sys admin because they have the _TIME_ to watch for security updates. And you _PAY_ a company like RedHat to ease that burden. A dedicated sysadmin will typically do a better job than a non-dedicated developer, but if that developer cannot do a passable job, that's a gap in their skillset. I may not be a network engineer, but I damned well understand DNS, MPLS, networking, gateways, and the like. Any developer who doesn't has gaps.
  - kingrazor 4y ago
    Maybe this says more about the devs I've worked with than devs as a whole, but most devs I've personally met know next to nothing about servers, and wouldn't be able to set one up if you asked them.
- zo1 4y ago
  That's a failing on our industry to some degree then. We automate everything and fix gaps with technical solutions all the time. But now, 20 years after the internet became huge, we think that we still haven't figured out how to easily provision servers. We have, we just let AWS et al capture all the value of that discovery. Yes I exaggerate a bit, but I do so to make a point stand out.

by zo1 4y ago

HWR_14 4y ago

Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
- alex_suzuki 4y ago
  Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
- unregistereddev 4y ago
  On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    I have a rant here about security being mostly bullshit. Not even sysadmins can setup a server "in the most secure, maintainable manner". You don't hire a dedicated sys admin because they know some voodoo magic developers don't, you hire a sys admin because they have the _TIME_ to watch for security updates. And you _PAY_ a company like RedHat to ease that burden. A dedicated sysadmin will typically do a better job than a non-dedicated developer, but if that developer cannot do a passable job, that's a gap in their skillset. I may not be a network engineer, but I damned well understand DNS, MPLS, networking, gateways, and the like. Any developer who doesn't has gaps.
- kingrazor 4y ago
  Maybe this says more about the devs I've worked with than devs as a whole, but most devs I've personally met know next to nothing about servers, and wouldn't be able to set one up if you asked them.
zo1 4y ago
That's a failing on our industry to some degree then. We automate everything and fix gaps with technical solutions all the time. But now, 20 years after the internet became huge, we think that we still haven't figured out how to easily provision servers. We have, we just let AWS et al capture all the value of that discovery. Yes I exaggerate a bit, but I do so to make a point stand out.