Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I feel his pain, in a sense.

I'm 24, and 'cloud' to me is 'a vps somewhere', I don't grok the difference, I've worked in elastic compute environments before, but that's definitely not what you're buying with things like EC2, and I simply don't see the value in it.

other things like the 'DevOps' title; seems to mean either a sysadmin who can do configuration management, or a developer who can configure apache.

everywhere I go, I feel like I should have a large set of development skills, but I've been in operations for 5 years now, and I'm regarded as being a very good ops person.

I'm a 24 year old sysadmin, and I feel like I'm being left behind.

this is not an industry you can grow old in, unless you become a manager or specialise.

at least... that's what I fear.

>I'm 24, and 'cloud' to me is 'a vps somewhere'

It is a VPS somewhere, ultimately. It's a VPS somewhere but it may be two of them or more. It may not be exactly where you think "somewhere" is, but it is somewhere. You don't know exactly what is running the VPS (or the bunch of them, somewhere), and what it runs, but it's running, it's a VPS, and it's somewhere.

We'll charge you 50% more to enjoy this uncertainty and to be able to use the word "cloud" alongside "synergy", "blue-sky thinking", "out of the box" and a few others when you describe your stack.

(On a less cynical note: with the "cloud" you're essentially paying to replace the known, common possible points of failure with unknown, usually rare points of failure, and some redundancy. Uncertainty can be a feature.)

> I simply don't see the value in it.

Your intuition is probably right. On EC2, you pay a lot and get very little, for the sake of flexibility that you may not need.

If you never find yourself saying "oh man I need another server for the next 6 hours", then EC2 is just overpriced hosting.

DevOps in my area means you do everything except clean the bathrooms for 1/2 the salary of whoever you are replacing, and work at least 10-12hrs per day because unlikely you can fit in customer support, chef/ansible/puppet deployment, databases, front and back end development, testing and debugging, presentations and piles of internal paperwork and emails in 8 hours.

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