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Comment by Walkman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why so many people are so scared/not interested/afraid of system administration. It's not that hard. Why does it have to be abstracted? Bringing more and more layers makes everything slower, more complex for sure. The only thing is really hard is configuring and managing an email server.

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I agree, in spirit. Setting up an app server, a web server, a MySQL database, or a cron job is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. There are a lot of complex sysadmin tasks -- running a BIND server, an email server, a Cassandra cluster, etc. -- but that's not what the majority of developers are doing.

I don't understand it, but as an SA there's also a lot of people who are incapable of thinking 5 minutes ahead to the next problem - which is also baffling because its pretty much the same as programming.

You setup a cronjob, did you code the script well, who does is notify, how do we know when it fails, what's the recovery strategy?

You mean like an in-house metal server? Well because I need to adjust resources on the fly sometimes, or experiment with different configurations, or test upgrades on my own.

That's why you use a virtual machine.

If you're wondering why to use a scripted provisioning system, it's to have that code under version control and shared between developers.

Which tells me that you never worked on a platform with multiple servers and complex network and storage situation. Atleast not for a few years when your infrastructure bitrots away and you're fighting to keep it all together most of the time. But by then you're used to the mess. No big deal.

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