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Comment by streetcat1 | Hacker News Reader

Developers did not took your job, it was the machines...

Kubernetes strength is its declarative nature. I.e. the actual "tasks" (the imperative part), moved into the controller code and is being automated away.

As more and more operators/CRD (i.e. automatic sysadmins) get written, more jobs will disappear.

For example, you can imagine a database operator that just by stating your schema (as an CRD), will create the tables for you, the indices, do automatic backup/restore, do automatic migrations, create the monitors and the alerts. I.e. will completely replace the DBA.

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There already is a database operator that can do everything you have listed and a lot more ( I helped write it ), but it doesn't remove the need for DBA's. It just changes what they do on a day to day basis. I think this is what OP was saying. Just because you have an operator that can do most of what a traditional DBA does doesn't mean you can replace all the world's DBA's. Someone still needs to know _why_ a specific query managed to do a multiplicative join and lock all your tables for hours, even if the operator knows how to flag that query and reject it.

Sure, but in a day of a dba, or even over a month, how much does he deals with understanding deadlocks?

BTW, the operator that I saw are not there yet. What I want to see is a CRD for a set of input schemas, and an output schema, and let the operator create the most efficient query.

I suspect that, if an organization, especially one with its own hardware, tries to move to Kubernetes in a cargo cultish way and without understanding the nature of the undertaking, this could easily lead to disaster and people getting fired.

That's another way Kubernetes can take away jobs :).

> I.e. will completely replace the DBA.

It replaces the DBA for routine maintenance. It does not replace the DBA when you need an expert to help you plan your database architecture and figure out what went wrong in production.

It might also replace, what you call an expert.

As compute get cheaper, the design goal of those new systems is to replace human time with computation time. This is the key idea behind automatic machine learning, for example.

Image a system that needs to map logical schema or architecture into the best implementation. The system can create 1000's of combinations, and test them against your data/queries. And come up with the best design.

I'm an old school sysadmin that recently has been making a buck doing "devops consultancy". In reality, my job is fixing stuff that the developers "automated" (because I don't really think an automation that is not performing any work is an automation at all). I've seen some scenarios that are hard to describe outside of my sysadmin expertise with something other than silly.

Not so recently I hear a lot of some Jessie guy, brilliant, who developed and amazing product and was a very good engineer. His team all made clear that this guy was so efficient that he was in charge of a lot of stuff; sadly he didn't documented a vital step of the development pipeline that was causing all the builds to fail and he left the company years ago. His team, that was at least capable enough to keep the ship afloat for more than two years without Jessie who was the driving force and main engineer, combed the documentation and code but couldn't find the problem, they appear to be pretty good coders and the codebase was clean enough that I do not question their capacity as developers, but the problem was too deep, mainly because as they told me, this Jessie guy was pretty great.

Well, actually the problem is that Debian Jessie reached EOL some time ago, and this guys recently they migrated the build server, losing all the image cache. They were unfamiliar enough with errors on the package manager and with the shadow of this Jessie guy that even if they found something about the backports url, they didn't thought it was related to their issue. Just changing the repo url was enough to keep them working again so I could take a look at the rest of the stuff.

That's just the silliest one I can think about, but just one of many. I'm certainly not over impressed with developers doing "devops" by themselves.

> will completely replace the DBA.

When you have paying customers or external SLAs, you need 2 departments:

1) DBA

2) Eng. Security

If you want to avoid hiring those people, there are things you can do:

1) design your app around a K-V store, like DynamoDB. Reporting (ie. aggregation) will be the tough part.

2) Have a sr. engineer review security weekly and file jiras that are followed up. Don't agree to any IT compliance standards without full-time security engineers.

To directly answer the parent poster, what he's talking about are the basic mechanical things that a DBA does, which is a small portion of a DBA's responsibilities.

For example, just deciding what to monitor and how to address the alerts on large tables alone justifies having a DBA. Coinbase and Gitlab have both had extended outages recently because of inadequate DBA resources.

When I talk to programmers, I start with, "Our masters have 400 days uptime. How does your new system maintain that level of availability?" Typically that's the end of the conversation.

Source: I am an experienced DBA.

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