Exactly! I'm a sysadmin (sometimes a Dev), but sysadmin is what i'm really good at. The most important thing is to see a solution from another perspective.
Sometimes, and sometimes we have to ask the developer of that exact OS-subsystem/driver/firmware(AARGH!!) because it fails us too...and here we have a closed circle ;)
I was in ops for 13 years, and if you were to talk to any of my former coworkers they would bury you with praise for the quality of my work. Yet, I eventually chose to move into a management track because I had peaked my career about 7 years in and didn't realize it until later. There was nowhere I could go up, because I wasn't a software developer. Now I'm a manager that has technology understanding, which has a high value prop for many orgs all on its own, but I do sometimes miss "getting my hands dirty".
I've worked with a lot of software developers over the years, and while there are a handful who are really incredible, the majority of people are just mediocre. That's expected and okay. The same is true for Ops folks, as it happens, although generally it takes more competence to rise to "Senior" on the Ops side vs software. The thing is, "Senior" is as high as it goes for Ops folks. So you might meet really stellar Ops folks who are effectively titled and paid the same as a mediocre developer with 3 years of work experience. It's simply not sustainable, and the push towards moving everything to the cloud and off-premise is probably a symptom of this (not enough quality Ops folks to keep things on-prem) and exacerbates this (reducing need for quality Ops folks, driving down market demand, unless you want to work at a cloud provider).
Pretty much all of the other Ops people I've respected and admired over the years have moved into different career paths. I find the same is not true for software developers. So when younger people ask me about career paths, I always recommend software over Ops, if they are adamant they never want to go into management.
It's kind of sad, I suppose, but that's the way of it. I appreciate that there's a subthread on HN where folks recognize and respect the value of competent Ops folks, but I think you'll find that most are being pushed out of that career path.
As soon as you start using the full suite of cloud tools, it's impossible to not give the provider the encryption key...
I'll be honest - you guys need to find a new technology partner then. Creating a private cloud that's reliable and offers the basic services that the major providers have is not difficult in 2020. Some of the aaS stuff can get tricky but is still entirely do-able.
Regardless, if they found a way to make your infrastructure MORE expensive than the public clouds they either have no idea how to negotiate or are really, really bad at their jobs. The public cloud is a lot of things - but cheap isn't one of them.
If your business involves any amount of low priority bulk compute, this gets much much easier. You simply let the low priority stuff fall behind while your order to Dell for new servers is being delivered...
Also, if you have compute that could be on-prem or could be in the cloud, you can set up a kubernetes cluster spanning both and let non-privacy-sensitive overflow to GCP as needed.
All of the above rarely comes out cost-effective though, because while the raw compute is cheaper to DIY-it, when you factor in the staff time to build, maintain, and deal with the shortcomings of your bodged-together on-site solution, it's going to come out much more expensive.
We've built out something homebrew like this using cheap compute desktops but you're still going to pay a lot upfront.
Meaning, e.g. there are specific, rigid rules regarding how Postman can be used while developing backend services, to avoid that customer info is inadvertently transmitted during testing.
Of course, it’s a PITA, but it serves its purpose.
But the idea that Postman is actually git in that analogy is hogwash and a way to wrest data out of people.
It's done on a budget as well so we're kinda forced to use open source software.
Weirdly enough we use Skype for work chat and Zoom for video meetings, so it feels a bit inconsistent.
It's like as if somehow, in many eyes, that's impossible now. Depending on your scale, it may be impractical given external hosting options but it's certainly not impossible. Lots of data centers rose and started automated processes of shared hosting and co-locating hardware which was a step forward. I remember working with Rackspace, Equinix, The Planet, etc. which further automated quicker server deployment, had applications for UPS resets/interrupts, etc. The more you moved towards a specific business's automation services, the less portable your infrastructure was outside that environment.
That continued on until you now have more sophisticated hosting like what AWS and GC provide. Now, abstractions exist for about everything in a data center and the trade off is that you now have to manage all that complexity through proprietary APIs, consoles, and so forth.
In addition, the tradeoff here is the more complex the infrastructure, the less easy it is to shift it to another provider. That may be fine for you, it may also not be. It's all definitely possible though.
We have a gitlab server, and connecting requires being on VPN, which requires 2FA, and then ssh, which requires your keys to be properly set up.
As long as you have decent hardware (cpu/ram mostly) and reliable storage (netapp or something similar) you can get stuff done very easily.
Also, most people seems to not have noticed how fast computers and disks got recently and how resources you can pack into a single physical machine: you can nowadays fill a 2u, 2socket machine with 128c/256t (2x amd epyc) and literally terabytes of ram...
Good luck finding one. The world is divided in 3 spheres of influence: US, China and Russia. To make business you must obey one of them.
For most practical purposes, the EU is nested within the US sphere of influence.
Thats not a insignificant cost.
Nobody attacks code repositories of non-software companies anyway, people are after CRM and ERP data. There is the occasional issue with malware from mails and special users, but a backup solution with 15min snapshots solves that issue. Although the latter can cost a bit and might be too expensive for smaller companies.
And honestly moving to these tools from slack, confluence, etc. has been awesome.
Zulip threading model is great. So much better than slack.
And using markdown and jupyter notebooks for documentation on gitlab? Damn awesome.
- Is your company mainly a software company?
- How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?
- How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?
- Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?
- Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?
These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.
Mostly yes. We obviously have sales, marketing, etc. as well.
> - How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?
I don't do devops. There is a team of people that works full-time on IT infrastructure. No idea how time they spend. Gitlab and Zulip servers are updated every couple of weeks. No idea how much time these cost.
> - How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?
There is a team of people that work on cybersecurity monitoring. No idea what they do. Normal IT people just make sure that everyone's computer is encrypted, setting up people's credentials, etc.
> Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?
I don't do anything, somebody does this for me.
> Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?
We have multiple locations and the backups are replicated across our own locations.
Obviously we're not all going to build our own CPUs from sand at a local beach. So there is a balance between DIY and vetted suppliers
I mean I like to think the data has no value to e.g. the US or competitors, and that the sheer volume makes it worthless, but I suspect that's just a lack of imagination on my part.