Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgb1984 | Hacker News Reader

jgb1984

It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.

View on HN

Both you and the parent commenter I replied to need to drop the notion these are people who are "afraid" of setting up their own servers.

No, these are people who don't care about setting up their own servers.

Similarly to how I just bought a NAS unit from Synology and just use Tailscale because I don't care about assembling a homebrew NAS or setting up my own VPN infrastructure, most people don't care about setting up their own servers.

Why do we not care? Because time is finite and we have more important shit we need or want to attend to.

Because setting up your server takes an infinite amount of time, while configuring things on AWS takes zero minutes, right?

I think the gap here is that UNIX sysadmin skills are a lot rarer than many people imagine, and are also incredibly time consuming to learn. UNIX is many things, user friendly isn't one of them. AWS offers GUIs that are well documented. Linux has ... man pages. Probably some blog posts from 2007 if you're lucky.

I mean, I admin my own servers. But I learned Linux as a kid when time was cheap. If you didn't have that experience then yeah it may make sense to just use as much cloud as possible. Sysadmin is just unpleasant even when you do know how to do it.

But I don't see how AWS actually saves you from needing to understand linux. Maybe the full serverless lambda stuff, maybe, but otherwise you're gonna have to set up your stuff on some virtual boxes

Yeah exactly, the more you buy into the cloud platform the less Linux you have to learn. Learning how to admin your own Postgres is a part of "learning Linux" but there's nothing fulfilling about learning apt, installing it and then discovering you can't connect out of the box. Then you have to learn vim, learning what pg_hba.conf is, and how to edit it, how to use systemctl to make the edit take effect, what sudo is etc ... it all takes time and it's not like it's a foundation of deep knowledge that'll be useful for other stuff to build on. Everything is wildly inconsistent and learning how to configure Postgres doesn't help much with learning how to do MySQL or other services. It's just a big pile of UNIX trivia.

If you think knowing apt / vim / postgresql / bash / linux intimately is a waste of time and just a pile of Unix trivia, then you and I are entirely different type of engineers / developers, I don't think we even speak the same language :) I'm actually grateful that your mindset is becoming more prevalent, as it only serves to increase the value of my own skillset.

Look at it this way: Most of us don't care how cars work, we outsource the production and maintenance because time is valuable compared to the money we spend.

Time is finite and there are more things in this world than we can ever afford to care in a single lifetime, not caring is a matter of budgeting that finite time so we can live our lives in a fruitful manner.

Again, making the false argument that instead of learning a system engineer skillset you need to learn nothing at all. As if instead of spending time on systems, everything will be magically done for you and it costs zero FTE headcount.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You spend a similar amount of time, but on different knowledge and tasks. And I'm saying I find my skillset more enjoyable and more useful compared to the vendor lock-in and Tower of cloud services of Babylon that is AWS/Azure/Google.

It only increases the value of that skillset if it's in demand. Look, I'm on your side on this, I've learned all this stuff and it'd be nice if it was in high demand. But it's just not. Most people's experience of apt-get stops at a Dockerfile, most people never learned vim and never will because they have VSCode, most people do not really know how to use bash and have never recompiled a kernel.

It's a truism that you can do stuff a lot cheaper yourself if you have these skills than paying a cloud to do it for you, but cloud services have grown like crazy for over a decade now and show no sign of slowing down. UNIX is fundamentally a user-hostile operating system, it will never change, and it's nice for those of us who learned it that we can sometimes convert our rapidly-obsoleting skills into savings (sometimes), but it doesn't seem likely to stay that way. The Linux vendors just haven't improved the usability of their platform at anywhere near a fast enough pace to keep up with the cloud vendors.

If it was the case that we needed less total aggregate time for a cloud deployment, we would see it represented in operations headcounts.

What I have witnessed is actually the opposite; as mentioned elsewhere in this thread I was on a team of 6 sysadmins (who knew perl/python and C as a requirement for employment, so more like "devops" but with worse tools): and we ran 1% of web traffic on a few hundred physical machines.

However, Ubisoft has 5% of it's total headcount as IT staff, my last job has roughly a similar number of staff for a multiplayer game as I had for a huge SaaS web-store which even ran it's own payment systems (IE; before Stripe existed) and had regulatory compliance issues to take care of. -- and Ubisoft is using AWS/Azure/GCP and has moved away from bare-metal hosting, and my last job only ever ran on cloud providers, as it was du-jour when they started the company.

I have yet to see any evidence that it actually saves time. I think it's weaponised short term thinking, because going from the console to a running system indeed takes less time, but the tinkering with CDK/Terraform/IAM/VPC and trying to architect your solution to be cost effective and reliable is taking at least an equivelant amount of time it seems.

Statistics don't lie here, if "devops" and "SRE" is the new sysadmin then headcounts have not fallen. Operations staff are in as much (or even more) demand as they were in 2010- We just made operations more complex and vendor specific.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com