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Comment by JVerstry | Hacker News Reader

Not so sure Docker is the only way forward when it comes to cloud scaling or deployment. VM templates are a very good alternative. They are more stable, more flexible/customizable and integrate more smoothly with CI.

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Docker, cloud hosted VM from templates, vagrant, Azure, AWS, it doesn’t really matter much to me. The important thing to me is that I no longer have any need for anyone else doing company wide infrastructure. We have several department heads engaged in a battle about who’s going to “own” our “cloud infrastructure” they seem Oblivious to the fact that the only thing we need from them is to negotiate an Azure or AWS subscription and after that they will loose any utility.

A lot of talented people are going to find them self in a problematic situation because the area in which their talents lie is only going to be handled by low wage jobs at google, Azure and Amazon. Even big companies won’t bother setting up their own hardware because the people are costly even if they have slight savings on private hardware.

> low wage jobs at google, Azure and Amazon

I have no idea what makes you say that. As far as I'm familiar with these roles, none of them are low paying. These companies tend to pay very well because of the amazing scalability involved in these roles. Any engineering work that scales linearly with the number of users is automated almost immediately and the focus is generally on very high-level work.

When you go from 100 corporations. Each having infrastructure teams of 50+ people to one provider running the same thing with 20 people from that pool the wages go down. While there certainly are well paid individuals behind Azure or AWS, they are rare compared to “the people on the floor”, and those people used to be able to rise to senior specialist in companies before, now they just order services from the big players.

Now don’t get me wrong there will always be avenues for the most talented players, but the crisis will come when the 45 out of the 50 strong infrastructure team at every larger corporation are no longer needed, and the last 5 will end up doing work that’s completely unrelated to their prior expertise.

I'll second this. My company does everything via AWS, and the personnel overhead for X00,000 users and regular major updates to everything is... maybe half of a full-time position, and it will be less than that when we finish overhauling the hard-to-scale legacy parts of our system.

> they seem Oblivious to the fact that the only thing we need from them is to negotiate an Azure or AWS subscription and after that they will loose any utility.

I've seen similar and they tried the following:-

- We'll provision VMs for you. Raise a ticket.

- We're doing "Hub & Spoke". You're not allowed to route any internet traffic except through our inspection proxies.

- We've disabled the API. You can only use the Console.

Basically, a couple of old school guys will do anything they can to disable automation, as otherwise they'll be accepting they can't really contribute anymore.

The old-school guys also think (rightly in some cases) that they have an added value. 10 years ago I was building a cloud platform and explaining to the security team that they would no longer receive tickets to manually configure routes on firewalls, the customers would do it from a console. I thought they’d be happy to be relieved of a menial, boring task but their reaction was “when we receive a ticket requesting to open all ports from any IP address, we can explain to the customer that it’s a dangerous idea. If they can configure it themselves, who will tell them?”

I lived through a "empower the developers with Devops", "prevent you doing menial tasks" project a while back and ended up with:

- A mail server which was an open relay, promptly shutdown for abuse

- Every single internal server on an external IP address with an allow any/any ACL

- Brand new environments built with PHP 5.0 in 2018 to run new development projects (EOL over ten years ago)

- Managers patting themselves on the back about the power of Devops

I have the feeling that you have literally no idea what you are talking about. Like at all. This usually comes from self entitles semi-decent full stack developers building same old crappy systems that break apart as soon as they get any decent usage.

Guys not all of you are the mythical 10x engineers working on the ground breaking stuff. Deal with it.

We have had most of these technologies way before they became commoditized. What we have done is that we have made them cheaper and more accessible to your average joe.

Containers ? Give me a break. We have had Solaris Zones provisioning mechanisms at large telcos before any of you even knew what a container is. People have been provisioning jails/zones with a click of a button for ages.

It's funny to me because just 10y ago people like you were yelling and screaming about losing jobs to offshore developers in India and Eastern Europe. There's no apocalypse anytime soon.

Things are getting revamped, they are better, faster and what's more important they are accessible. Just because you know how to use docker does not mean you are able to manage a production ready infrastructure. AWS or any of the big providers are not a silver bullet. Never will be. They are at the end of the day very costly services not suitable for all business.

Cloud doesn't have to be actually better, cheaper, faster, etc, to consolidate and reduce ops, system admin and network jobs. It just has to be highly popular.

So the jobs change. They move into "Developer" category where we will hire Developer with domain knowledge of "networks", "systems" or "operations".

I have seen it many times with big data, chatops (we wont ever need to login to the system! we will do everything via hipchat/slack/whatever), openstack (who even needs aws?!).

Yadda yadda.

The work to manage infrastructure is smaller if most of it is centralized at Amazon or similar. Yes, there's still client side work, but there's an overall shift, consolidate, reduce, pattern.

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