Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Well, yeah. 25 years ago, there was a thing called a sysadmin. A sysadmin was an infrastructure engineer that knew how to code to automate everything. There was SAGE and various UNIX and linux groups.

A lot of Windows people disliked the concept of Sysadmins because they didn’t know how to program and tried to paint the concept as elitist.

A decade later someone announces the concept of DevOps, which is an infrastructure engineer that knows how to code to automate everything.

Whatever. it’s not worth getting worried about. At least automation is being considered important again, we have infrastructure as code now, the languages are better than Perl, sendmail is dead, and as long as you stop them installing kubernetes unnecessarily (which they will try) they’ll be fine.

> A decade later someone announces the concept of DevOps, which is an infrastructure engineer that knows how to code.

… except that’s not what the concept was.

…to automate everything. I wrote it out fully the first time, and didn’t think I’d have to write it out the second, but hey, there’s always one person. If you don’t think devops is about automation… honestly I actually don’t care have a great day.

> A sysadmin was an infrastructure engineer that knew how to code to automate everything.

… on a metal server. In Bash.

Bash? What a luxury. I mean we had bash, but all our scripts were made to work with plain old /bin/sh

I still save non-sh compatible bash scripts as .bash and my colleagues have no idea why, because they don't know Bourne shell is a thing.

Or in VMs, or in containers. In Bash, Perl, Python.

But what do you think software runs on these days? Magical immaterial containers? Bare metal is still there, just a few (more or less terrible) abstractions away. And please check out https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes - Oh noes, k8s is 3% bash? The horror :))))

I hate k8s lol, I tend to use AWS ECS.

My point is that today sysadmin skills are not enough. You need Python (boto3), APIGW and Lambda, years of Cloudformation and stuff. Does not hurt tho :)

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