And yet, the "expensive" hardware of now is cheaper than your single server from over a decade if you look at the whole picture... a lot of development trends are based on capitalism incentives:
- Outsourcing stuff like server hardware management to AWS is 1-3 FTEs less on your payroll, plus saving of datacenter related cost (climate control, UPS maintenance, Internet uplink, redundant equipment/spare parts)
- "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE)
- "microservices" got popular because it's easier to onboard developers and treat them like disposable cogs if your work packages can be really small, with clearly defined interfaces
There's plenty of us old UNIX greybeards working in DevOps. And frankly in most fields of IT you're going to see your fair share of younger engineers because that's literally how life works: people get old and retire while younger people look for work. Moaning that kids don't know the tech they don't need to know is a little like trying to piss in the wind: you might get some short term relief but ultimately you're only going to soil yourself.
edit: It's also funny that you moan about AWS as outsourcing while saying "people don't remember Unix" yet Unix itself comes from a heritage of time sharing services which are the same basic principles of cloud computing.
If you're old enough you'll eventually see all trends in computing repeat themselves.
A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit of email management, MySQL, a "pay now" page imported from a payment provider, and they were making good money for a minimal startup cost. All the code written by one or two people, often some external help with the graphics, and sometimes the business concept was someone else's idea.
Obviously the services weren't scalable, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users, and they didn't operate globally.
But they didn't need to. And that's still true of many startups today.
A few of them sold up for large sums.
The "microservice" name just seems to be the modern way to make all forms of distributed RPC hipster fashionable.
Unix isn't that hard. And Docker containers and CI/CD pipelines open other cans of worms, and since no one seems to understand what is going on under the surface (because no one wants to touch Unix), they just add more monitoring tools and scaling.
But we suddenly need five times as many developers because 80% of the code is just dealing with interfaces and communication and handling race conditions and recovering from failed network calls.
I saw a script written by a devops employee where they zeroed out all the partitions when they added a new web server.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-init...