Title: Obsolete in the IT crossfire

	Title: Obsolete in the IT crossfire
	Author: Solène
	Date: 09 July 2021
	Tags: life linux unix openbsd
	Description:

	# Preamble

	This is not an article about some tech but more me sharing feelings
	about my job, my passion and IT. I've met a Linux system at first in
	the early 2000 and I didn't really understand what this was, I've
	learned it the hard way by wiping Windows on the family computer (which
	was quite an issue) and since that time I got a passion with computers.
	I made a lot of mistakes that made me progress and learn more, and the
	more I was learning, the more I saw the amount of knowledge I was
	missing.

	Anyway, I finally got a decent skill level if I could say, but I
	started early and so my skill is related to all of that early Linux
	ecosystem. Tools are evolving, Linux is morphing into something
	different a bit more every year, practices are evolving with the
	"Cloud". I feel lost.

	# Within the crossfire

	I've met many people along my ride in open source and I think we can
	distinguish two schools (of course I know it's not that black and
	white): the people (like me) who enjoy the traditional ecosystem and
	the other group that is from the Cloud era. It is quite easy to bash
	the opposite group and I feel sad when I assist at such dispute.

	I can't tell which group is right and which is wrong, there is
	certainly good and bad in both. While I like to understand and control
	how my system work, the other group will just care about the produced
	service and not the underlying layers. Nowadays, you want your service
	uptime to have as much nine as you can afford (99.999999) at the cost
	of having complex setup with automatic respawning services on failure,
	automatic routing within VMs and stuff like that. This is not
	necessarily something that I enjoy, I think a good service should have
	a good foundation and restarting the whole system upon failure seems
	wrong, although I can't deny it's effective for the availability.

	I know how a package manager work but the other group will certainly
	prefer to have a tool that will hide all of the package manager
	complexity to get the job done. Tell ansible to pop a new virtual
	machine on Amazon using Terraform with a full nginx-php-mysql stack
	installed is the new way to manage servers. It seems a sane option
	because it gets the job done, but still, I can't find myself in there,
	where is the fun? I can't get the fun out of this. You can install
	the system and the services without ever see the installer of the OS
	you are deploying, this is amazing and insane at the same time.

	I feel lost in this new era, I used to manage dozens of system (most
	bare-metal, without virtualization), I knew each of them that I bought
	and installed myself, I knew which process should be running and their
	usual CPU/memory usage, I got some acquaintance with all my systems. I
	was not only the system administrator, I was the IT gardener. I was
	working all the time to get the most out of our servers, optimizing
	network transfers, memory usage, backups scripts. Nowadays you just
	pop a larger VM if you need more resources and backups are just
	snapshots of the whole virtual disk, their lives are ephemeral and
	anonymous.

	# To the future

	I would like to understand better that other group, get more confident
	with their tools and logic but at the same time I feel some aversion
	toward doing so because I feel I'm renouncing to what I like, what I
	want, what made me who I am now. I suppose the group I belong too will
	slowly fade away to give room to the new era, I want to be prepared to
	join that new era but at the same time I don't want to abandon the
	people of my own group by accelerating the process.

	I'm a bit lost in this crossfire. Should a resistance organize against
	this? I don't know, I wouldn't see the point. The way we do computing
	is very young, we are looking for a way. Humanity has been making
	building for thousands and years and yet we still improve the way we
	build houses, bridges and roads, I guess that the IT industry is
	following the same process but as usual with computers, at an insane
	rate that humans can barely follow.

	# Next

	Please share with me by email or mastodon or even IRC if you feel
	something similar or if you got past that issue, I would be really
	interested to speak about this topic with other people.

	# Readers reactions

	ew.srht.site reply

	# After thoughts (UPDATE post publication)

	I got many many readers giving me their thoughts about this article and
	I'm really thankful for this.

	Now I think it's important to realize that when you want to deploy
	systems at scale, you need to automate all your infrastructure and then
	you lose that feeling with your servers. However, it's still possible
	to have fun because we need tooling, proper tooling that works and
	bring a huge benefit. We are still very young in regards to automation
	and lot of improvements can be done.

	We will still need all those gardeners enjoying their small area of
	computer because all the cloud services rely on their work to create
	duplicated system in quantity that you can rely on. They are making
	the first most important bricks required to build the "Cloud", without
	them you wouldn't have a working Alpine/CentOS/FreeBSD/etc... to deploy
	automatically.

	Both can coexist, both should know better each other because they will
	have to live together to continue the fantastic computer journey,
	however the first group will certainly be in a small number compared to
	the other.

	So, not everything is lost! The Cloud industry can be avoided by
	self-hosting at home or in associative datacenter/colocations but it's
	still possible to enjoy some parts of the great shift without giving up
	all we believe in. A certain balance can be found, I'm quite sure of
	it.