What fascinates me about this is, and sorry for being morbid, but what happens when y'all die? Does knowledge of the lower levels of the stack go away with your generation, or will there be enough of us young ones picking the important stuff up?
Been there, done that, fought that shit the first time. And the second. And the third. (it's amazing how often I find myself solving what are essentially the same problems over and over.) It's one reason why you'll find we'll push back on the "ohh shiny". There are many wonderful and fascinating things coming out. Tech is an amazing field to be working in. But it's also ridiculously frustrating because no one pays any attention to _why_ things are done the way they are, or _why_ approaches haven't worked in the past (I'm all for re-introducing past failed approaches, as long as there's evidence those reasons have been investigated)
You'll find a common trend amongst us in that most of us sort of ended up in the role accidentally. Schools and college teach you to become developers. Few people tend to head to college with the view of specialising in the ops side of things.
Even speaking as a comparatively old-school sysadmin, my strengths come from being flexible and adaptable. What I do today is nothing like what I was doing 5 years ago, and what I did then is nothing like what I was doing 5 years before that, and so on down the line. The field is constantly in flux.
I just have the best part of two decades of experience to both anticipate the problems, and be able to get to diagnosis quicker when things do go wrong.
Even as the older sysadmins die off I'm fairly confident there will be newer ones to replace them, because people are going to continue to learn from the problems they run in to.
I'm even using ansible for ad-hoc stuff (tweaking a config, restarting a service) because it's easier to do that from a management server than log in to some remote host, get oriented as to the OS distribution and version, and run commends in the shell there.
Edit: The thing I really like about Ansible is how unsexy it is, it's just a nice sane way of doing largely what you could do yourself with ssh and bash but in a language that doesn't make you want to cry.
I've been around linux since the 90's and Ansible feels comfortable, predictable and stable - what you would want in a piece of software that can be mission critical in the most fundamental sense.
Salt, like Ansible, is a response to the Puppet/Chef hegemony -- ruby and DSL's and tacked-together bits that are a nightmare to install and upgrade in themselves).
I'd suggest Salt did some things much cleaner than Ansible, and while it can be an orchestrator, and deployment system, it also excels as a configuration management system ... but I think typically people are talking about configuration management systems that are tightly coupled with more formal change management systems (of which I've found pretty much none that work well).
Ansible automates even provisioning in AWS. I never really liked CloudFormation's way of creating stacks, so I began to use Ansible to document the application's stack, have used it to deploy systems running in EC2 with RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc.
After provisioning/configuring I'd end up with an instance in EC2 with Docker installed and from there our CI/CD would just trigger the deployment playbook that simply would do a `docker pull` of the version tagged for release and start the container.
Ansible helped to also install our Splunk forwarders as running it from Docker was a hassle still not so long ago, so we would have the best of both worlds: configurability of the host machine completely with Ansible and packaging and predictability of deployment through Docker.
I advocate this stack as simple enough to learn and use with widely used tools without their fancy (and often broken) features. Even though they can be still a bit immature, they are production-ready enough.
Want to guarantee your child's future employment? Don't just teach them to code (the machines will do that). Teach them how to build networks and truly understand network protocols.
You know like “ahh don’t call the messaging endpoint more than 800 mega-milli-times per mega-nano-second or it will cost you three bazillion CPU credits, but only on three and a half cores which will starve all your instances, issue an invoice and proceed to melt your credit card.”
I don't know how the situation is in the US, but in my country network engineering is actually quite a popular field of study. (we have college level education in network engineering).
The one thing that stands out though is that it's mostly done by youngsters who have either sysadmin experience, or worked in IT before that. Almost everyone who comes from high school goes into Software Engineering.
I think this is mainly because networking is quite an invisible field so to speak. Many people don't even know your job exists, and many young people only see the shiny hip side of it. (being Software Engineering).
Being good at network engineering is hard, especially once you get past entry level work and actually start being responsible for designing large-scale networks. Mainly because building a network is a major financial investment where garuanteeing performance is hard without either a ton of experience, or a shitton of lab time.
this kind of work pays very, very well though.
Building networks and understanding protocols is something machines can do TODAY. The entire internet was built to survive a nuclear war. It can reshape itself, and it most definitely understand network protocols. By definition, protocols are the language of machines over the network. And it's been like this for a few decades.
The only reason knowing low level network protocols in a world where machines can code anything (which makes them better analytical thinkers than humans) is to beg the machines for mercy in their ancient tongue.
It really, really can't! That quote about the Internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it? Or the one about information "wanting" to be free? Taken wildly out of context.
Don't forget BGP. I don't think they do what you think they do, at least, not to the extent you think they do them. There is a hell of a lot of manual work in running any sizeable network even within a single organisation.
> There is a hell of a lot of manual work in running any sizeable network even within a single organisation.
I'm not trying to say they do everything, and no manual work is required. I'm trying to say machines are already doing part of it. OP believes that give a world where machines can code, they can't design or maintain networks, which I find truly ridiculous, since machines are pretty far from doing any kind of "coding" today, but they do networking and network protocols pretty well.
The first attempt at a system to turn plain English that even managers could write into executable code was 1959 - COBOL. So you're right in a sense, even 59 years later - but also wrong if you think networks are any more advanced than this. The Internet really cannot "reshape itself" and probably never will be able to.
So, what do network engineers do? Classically, Set up and troubleshoot those systems. Currently, transforming from manual work to building systems to deploy, monitor, and remediate routers and such. In other words, the same stuff sysadmins->(SRE|PE) folks do and undergoing a similar transition.
SRE methods are quite applicable to neteng: https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/eliminating-toi...
They're still just tools wielded by humans, even at a distance. Even today.
This isn't a field that is done inventing. Not even remotely close.
You lose and gain and you should always be mindful of what is coming. Humility is good. I love you young guys, your ideas keep coming and they are mostly good.
The trouble is making sure these plans actually work. This is why Netflix randomly execute some of their employees every month.
Would that be their King Kong application?
I certainly hope this practice doesn't start catching on with other employers.
The key is to pick smart people who are good at learning and find complex systems interesting. Then, of course, you need to have interesting projects for them to work on.
Some monkeys will just keep swinging branch to branch. Some monkeys check out the tree.
Of course, one can argue that that will just cause a new wave of openness and the cycle continues.
(As almost everyone else points out, the closed cloud vendor stuff is nowhere near flexible enough for most moderately complicated use cases unless you’re running at serious scale.)
This is a false crisis.
The risk is in treating anything as a black box, whether its a managed service or a container you pull from Dockerhub. It's something you'll get burned by eventually and need to learn from experience.