terpans

> todays pipelines include a whole new level of security that was pretty much ignored in 2005.

The very opposite.

> Security adds complexity

If anything, complexity is the enemy of security

Indeed all of those things existed and they weren’t in widespread use because 99% of organization did not need them. And it hasn't changed.

> 2 sysadmins were absolutely not managing “large scale deployments with multiple data centers”

Please don't make things up because I was there.

> But today it’s actually super plausible that 2 or 3 Devops with modern tooling can manage all of that.

Not really.

I was working on large scale deployments with multiple datacenters, multiple databases, message passing networks and running multiple customer-facing products.

Load balancers and HA setups were already in use. LVS existed. VMs were popular. "CI/CD" existed, without that name.

> 2005 your average box ...

Speak for yourself.

2005: your infrastructure is automated using a handful of Bash, Perl and Python scripts written by two system administrators. They are custom, sometimes brittle and get rewritten every 5 years.

2022: your infrastructure is automated using 10 extremely complex devops tools. You automated the two system administrators away - but then had to hire 5 DevOps engineers paid 2x more. The total complexity is 10x.

They wrote YAML, TOML, plus Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform scripts. They are custom, sometimes brittle and get rewritten every 3 years.

EDIT: to the people claiming that today's infra does more things... No, I'm comparing stuff with the same levels of availability, same deployment times, same security updates.