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To manage a large fleet of physical servers, you need similar ops skills. You're not going to configure all those systems by hand, are you?

awslol 3y ago
Depends on the size of the fleet. If you're using less than a dozen servers manual configuration is simpler. Depending on what you're doing that could mean serving a hundred million customers. Which is plenty for most business.
- icedchai 3y ago
  A dozen servers would be pushing it. It's not the size of the fleet, it's the consistency and repeatability of configuration and deployment. I assume there are other, non-production servers: various dev environments, test/QA. How do you ensure every environment is built to spec without some level of automation? It's the old "pets" vs "cattle" argument. I've worked at companies with their own data centers and manual configuration. Every system was a pet.
postalrat 3y ago
They spent $150,000 on physical servers. Probably 1 or 2 racks. Not much of a 'fleet'.
- ketzo 3y ago
  I mean, “fleet” semantics aside, surely $150,000 of servers is enough for at least one full-time person to be maintaining them. The point is that there are absolutely maintenance and ops costs associated with these servers.
  - dijit 3y ago
    There's maintenance cost to everything that runs a userland. What we're missing is tracking what time is spent managing hardware and firmware, (or even network config, if we're being generous) and how much time is being spent on OS config. From personal experience (as a sysadmin before it was entirely unsexy as a term) the overwhelming majority of my ops work was done in userland on the machine, maybe something like 96-97% of my tasks were nothing to do with hardware at all. Since I got rebranded as SRE, the tools and the pay sure did get a lot better in the time, but the job is largely similar and ultimately running in VMs does make deployment faster, but once deployed I find the maintenance burden to be the same (or perhaps a little more) as things seem to become deprecated or require changes from our cloud vendor a bit more often.

awslol 3y ago

Depends on the size of the fleet. If you're using less than a dozen servers manual configuration is simpler. Depending on what you're doing that could mean serving a hundred million customers. Which is plenty for most business.

icedchai 3y ago
A dozen servers would be pushing it. It's not the size of the fleet, it's the consistency and repeatability of configuration and deployment. I assume there are other, non-production servers: various dev environments, test/QA. How do you ensure every environment is built to spec without some level of automation? It's the old "pets" vs "cattle" argument. I've worked at companies with their own data centers and manual configuration. Every system was a pet.

postalrat 3y ago

They spent $150,000 on physical servers. Probably 1 or 2 racks. Not much of a 'fleet'.

ketzo 3y ago
I mean, “fleet” semantics aside, surely $150,000 of servers is enough for at least one full-time person to be maintaining them. The point is that there are absolutely maintenance and ops costs associated with these servers.
- dijit 3y ago
  There's maintenance cost to everything that runs a userland. What we're missing is tracking what time is spent managing hardware and firmware, (or even network config, if we're being generous) and how much time is being spent on OS config. From personal experience (as a sysadmin before it was entirely unsexy as a term) the overwhelming majority of my ops work was done in userland on the machine, maybe something like 96-97% of my tasks were nothing to do with hardware at all. Since I got rebranded as SRE, the tools and the pay sure did get a lot better in the time, but the job is largely similar and ultimately running in VMs does make deployment faster, but once deployed I find the maintenance burden to be the same (or perhaps a little more) as things seem to become deprecated or require changes from our cloud vendor a bit more often.