I understand there’s a few techy people on here so thought will ask, but it’s not really a technical question.
My computing experience is split between Linux/FreeBSD (UNIX-like) operating system administration on one side, and C#.NET over IIS over SQL development on another, with the system business domain being Manufacturing.
Newer versions of our systems are going cloud-based. Either Docker or Kubernetes, or serverless.
I’m no stranger to virtualisation and my infrastructure understanding is pretty strong, however I’m no genius. I’ve been doing plenty research and reading up on the above technologies, even had the apprentice at work try to explain it to me, and have a friend who is expert in it helping to explain it to me.
My question is, is all this new stuff really very complicated? Am I just stupid or am I right to feel overwhelmed when looking at newer software tech these days?
At least I’ve only wasted a fairly crappy saturday and not spent it on ebay bidding for shit I don’t need, so there is that.
I hear ya! It just seems a bit of a false economy to me, you pay a load of contractors $1000 a day to set up this kube farm, nobody gets it, it falls over frequently and then $$$ contractors to fix it again, takes longer to spin up your containers.
Sure, if you’re starting from scratch, setting up Amazon 2.0 or something, kube all the way, but wasting development time replacing Windows VMs with containers? Bah.
We introduced computers to solve problems with Humans.
Not complicated, this is mostly old stuff being recycled and automated. Check DevOps - Wikipedia and Infrastructure as code - Wikipedia . Your skills are still relevant just need to build on top, as always in tech jobs.
I don’t have an issue with that, but it does seem very gimmicky. What’s the real benefit to the end user of whatever is being hosted by this stuff? Or is it merely a platform for beat-the-clock development for changes which the end-user probably doesn’t even want (every Facebook/Instagram update ever)
If you take two finished system architectures, one barebone and one in the cloud there should be little difference for the user, that is the goal…A bit more performance here and a bit more reliability there maybe, most users won’t notice and don’t need to know how a system is hosted.
Now I would question how you turn an idea into a finished system. The upfront investment needed to setup a barebone architecture (not the average operating cost) cannot compare with the cost structure of a cloud architecture. A lot of new projects won’t even get out of the ground on a barebone architecture, especially when a proven alternative exists carrying less risk (for the investor or higher management).
Yeah that’s fair I suppose, for very small start-ups, cloud is the way to go, although you get stung later on in terms of running costs I suppose, and you don’t have the asset on the balance sheet of the hardware and software sitting there on your books. But contract developer rates for containerised solutions are surely more expensive than the equivalent .NET Windows Service developer, no? As it’s a more involved process? Or maybe not?
I will add though that we have more issues with our cloud-based solutions than on-prem, mostly because it depends on the internet line which is overloaded with never-ending video calls and meme-sharing right now
The economies of projects in startups and new projects in big companies are somewhat equivalent. In big companies you may also find internal standardization of infrastructure to take into account.
I don’t really believe in the correlation between developer rate and particular tech stacks, a good dev is way more than that.
Are they? AWS doesn’t have the start-up cost of spending 20k+ on hardware, does it? Otherwise, I see your point.
Would you say the docker/kube method is more or less difficult to work with than other older technologies? .NET devs are dime-a-dozen, but Docker/K8S is still finding its feet as far as I understand?
From AWS internal dev team point of view using the internal cloud or external cloud is similar, there will be some sort of accounting reflecting the resources used so that the team performance may be evaluated.
Docker/k8s is production-grade and heavily used, it’s not more or less difficult, it is different. What is difficult and frustrating is to use one technology from the standpoint of another technology. Docker, etc, are not there to totally replace earlier technology stacks, it is there to augment them.
kthnxbai
