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The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin” was that the dev part dragged in the worst thing about developer culture: the love of complexity and the tendency to build massive towers of it.

Sysadmins usually avoided complexity because their attitude toward it was more sensible: it’s expensive, fragile, and tends to actually multiply failure modes.

I also blame cloud marketing. This stuff is a gigantic money printer for cloud companies. It’s in their interest to encourage as much over engineering as possible, especially if it locks you into things like Kubernetes that are hard to run and thus usually used as services.

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I swear, I've come to identify myself simple stacker. Complexity should be avoided wherever reasonably possible. But where it's not, it's best left and maintained with the devs who want it.

> The problem with devops replacing the old title “sysadmin”....

That is a very good observation.

I think that now I am going to stop using the term Dev Ops and start using System Administration.

Wise words, thank you

> I also blame cloud marketing.

burying the lede, mon ami.

biggest tech companies in the world, the ones using this tech, are also the ones with massive ad and marketing complexes.

"of course cloud and devops and k8s are great, buy buy buy!"

a decade later OpEx is out of control and wrangling the craziness requires its own brand of "FinOps"

If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

Emacs has a button for that :-).

People arent missing the value, nobody is saying it wont perform as advertised -- the discussion is about the cost.

Setting up a testing & deploy via a CI script is basically free. AWS gives away CodeDeploy for free. Ansible is open source. I learned all this stuff working on open source stuff where platforms like GitHub give you free compute time.

The discussion here is not the method of deployment, but the infra architecture.

You don't need k8s, containers, and multiple cloud instances to automate deployment.

It's perfectly possible and simple to implement a button to deploy on a single machine.

Heck, on OVH or Hetzner, you can have a dedicated bare metal machine with many cores and RAM exclusive to you, cheaper than famous cloud instances. These bare metals will handle what takes sometimes hundreds of containers to handle, with a much simple and easy to maintain infra.

You can deploy k8s on a single machine though. This way you get the benefit of a standardized, documented API without the burden of multiple machines.

Your still setting up K8's... I have scp'd my go binary and set it up in system d.

Nothing about K8 or containers are light... they are buckets where bad devs hide the bodies in most cases.

kubernetes is also a static go binary (kubelet) deployed with systemd!

Why use k8s over just a docker container?

Dont deploy docker in production. Podman.

You could but why all the extra overhead?

Docker has no overhead on the Linux kernel. It just runs things for you via LXC. The overhead is no different from any other process.

The last time I checked docker was libcontainer and not running lxc any longer.

Libcontaier lxc all use the same api calls to the kernel... so in effect your still correct (mostly)

They all have overhead, if you're starting to use their features... cgroups can have some very funny impacts on app performance more so if your running containers ontop of a linux install over a hypervisor vs nix on hardware.

Just use a base OS that has what you need? :D

Was asking seriously. Haven't had the opportunity to use k8s but I've used container hosting elsewhere so I'm curious why k8s specifically.

Yes, do that 99% of the time actually.

SO I should put my static go binary in a container, so you can deploy a static go binary to deploy the container with my static go binary in it.

Do you see how many extra steps that is.

This is the best joke I've heard all week. Standardized in what way? By who or what governing body?

Why would someone want to self-torture into k8s if they only need a single machine?

If you need isolation for multiple services, just use a container... I don't see an orchestration need that justifies using k8s on a single machine. For such context, it's too much hassle for very little value in return.

> cheaper than famous cloud instances

Not just cheaper, fixed cost.

Everyone who cried about exit fees on AWS needed the lesson of failing to plan ahead...

You can also have ugly manual ad hoc Kubernetes workflows where random devs hack YAML in prod directly. I’ve even seen people ssh into running containers and change things.

This isn’t any better than Joe sysadmin and could be worse since the complexity is higher and there’s a greater chance to do more damage with one change. Adding complexity makes bad process worse.

Hey ! I click on a button to deploy. Turns out that button does the sshing but that still counts, right ?

> If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.

Maybe clicking a button that sshes into the box and runs git pull?

PSA: please don't follow a manual checklist over ssh. At least write an Ansible playbook that does those things repeatably, or even better, script idempotent changes in an .rpm or .deb to install.

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