The previous generation deployed their simple Django and Rails apps onto overpriced Heroku.

Systems administration has died when it started being called DevOps and got enormously overengineered to the point the golden handcuffs are the only option for pure or beginner developers. When the pathologically lazy sysadmin in a black tshirt got replaced by the ever busy and corporate friendly DevOps types going to fancy conferences.

As someone that started as a Linux/UNIX sysadmin and is having an interview for a DevOps position in an hour, I wonder when and why did this shift appear? When did sysadmins find a new job title on their door? Must've been around 2012 or so.

Good luck with the interview!

> deploying isn't that hard with today's tooling

I would argue that deploying today is much harder in comparison to how hard it is to build software in the first place. Building a profitable MVP product is much easier than rolling out your own infra for said product

Yes deployment got a lot easier, but product development got much easier in comparison (at least until you run into scalability issues)

In a lot of cases, it's less that developers are afraid of light sysadmin tasks and more that companies don't employ anyone capable of development, outsource it to agencies, and then end the relationship once the project is complete. If the devs deploy it to Vercel or Netlify or similar, they can be reasonably certain it will run as-is for months and probably years with no intervention because they client won't be willing to spend money on maintenance. That makes their client happy and leads to repeat business later down the line when budgets allow. Tech debt and lack of proper maintenance is a significant concern with agency projects and is why companies like Vercel and Wordpress hosts like WP Engine are able to spin up and grow so quickly.

I can do all of those sysadmin tasks (learned FreeDBD sysadmin at UC Berkeley’s student ISP) but the experience offered by Vercel (free for hobby user!) is so much better than managing my own VPS, why would I consider it? Even for a team of 10 @ $20/mo, Vercel seems so worth it for preview deploys per branch, production environment management, CDN, etc. “light system management” doesn’t cover any of those tasks, and the whole team is gonna move waaay faster compared to fiddling with VPS provisioning.

> Postgres, Redis

Vercel doesn’t do either of these, but you can pick Postgres up from Superbase (for free) in a few clicks. But I might consider Planetscale for the production DB fork & schema management stuff even though it’s MySQL instead of Postgres.