Notices by z428 (z428@social.tchncs.de), page 5

@Vamp898 Sounds like it. Then again, having 4 people *only* for Linux administration sounds quite a comfortable thing. Usual experience (including my own environment) is either having way fewer people or having them responsible for way more "heterogenous" things (managing network infrastructure and workstations, handling Windows servers, antivirus systems and firewalls, handling technologies such as monitoring and logging servers, ...). That makes life considerably difficult, ...

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 Just in terms of numbers: How much infrastructure and people in charge of are we talking about, here?

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 @ShinIce ... even leaving aside things such as costs for power supply and A/C, hardware maintainance folks and processes, low-level administration, all that stuff. I agree, though, that public cloud can and most likely will be an expensive mess if done wrong, also due to the fact that billing conditions and approaches (see Azure) are apparently more complex than even Oracle Database licensing terms.

@Vamp898 Hmmmm... Our figures did look rather different. We don't (so far) use public cloud but a compute center at a local ISP who provides us with VMs on top of either VMWare (which are more expensive but offer a bit more performance) and RedHat Virtualization (which are a bit slower/cheaper at the moment). Even just talking about the resources required by our applications, this model has proven to be just slightly more expensive than running bare-metal on our own, and that ...

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 ... being a bit protected from hard-to-overcome vendor lock-ins and being completely in control of your data *the* most important aspects to think self-hosting and FLOSS these days.

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 ... might (will?) need to have more and more skilled people to keep this running. You will need to have generally more know-how in low-level stuff you operate, and it will be harder to buy external support and help even in critical situations. It also might require more up-front effort for building things yourself that come "out of the box" with offers like, say, RedHat Virtualization or VMWare. Honestly, I don't really see price as a relevant aspect here. I merey see ...

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 I agree with the Free Software part, but I also think about different models of operating infrastructure in general (I've been writing about that in length here: https://dm.zimmer428.net/2018/11/libresaas-revisited/ ). But still I think the calculation of running things in-house, even using Free Software, to be "cheaper" is extremely difficult to compare even talking, say, HP/VMWare vs. Krenn/custom Linux virtualization. Maybe initial investments in this stuff is lower. At the downside, you ...

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 You're right. But that's not the point. It's not the point not being *able* to know how software works (in case of Slack, in example). The point is not being *required* to know how a software works, not being required to actually set it up and run it and fully manage it in order to use it. At least not every piece of software. And that's a completely different approach. One I am not really easy with in many situations, but I understand why people do it.

@ShinIce

@Vamp898 I don't disagree. We're only arguing about where the boundary of this "system" is.

@Vamp898 I'm not sure, in example, someone working on Word, Visual Studio Code or parts of the developer-facing tools of Azure will have ideas of, in example, Windows kernel does memory management and IPC. You can't be good at *all* of these aspects, even trivial systems are way too complex for this to be managed by *one* individual. You need to focus on things.

@Vamp898 ... on top, to finally handle these. This works, but this is entirely against even any idea of FLOSS and collaborative problem solving, as against most of the hacker culture that explicitely tries *not* to re-solve problems that have been solved before. 😉

@Vamp898 ... adding certain "standardized" layers of abstraction, knowing an admin needs to know all above this layer but can take this layer as granted and doesn't necessarily need a perfect understanding of what's below. Otherwise, each and every computer programmer or network admin would be required to do all the things bottom to top, from soldering a computer and building network components, to writing operating system and drivers for those, to building certain applications and services ...

@Vamp898 But that's how things are for most technology and most people. I have little to no idea how my car works, internally. And frankly I don't care. Likewise, with the rise of virtualization, I don't have to care very much anymore what's inside my physical hardware, and I am *incredibly* happy about that because it keeps me from wasting a lot of thime on things that can very well break, things that can be misconfigured and broken and go awfully wrong. It's, in my opinion, about ...

@Vamp898 (By the way: Writing a custom package manager still massively is about standing on the shoulder of giants. What I meant would be more along the lines of teaching your trainees Assembler and tell them to write an operating system kernel of their own on plain hardware... 😉 )

@Vamp898 If your environment and company has a business model providing enough funding to be able to afford that - great. 😉 I'd love to both learn and teach as many even low-level things as possible, but in most situations, that's anything but affordable.

@Vamp898 ... system example: For the vast majority of companies, it would be totally out of scope to develop a custom operating system kernel. It's extremely expensive, it's much likely to be not their core business objective, it doesn't make real sense at all.

@Vamp898 ... make a somewhat complex system manageable, and in this case "easy" means "easy for someone who's not necessarily knee-deep into Debian, Gento, whatever distro you use". Not even talking about administering a bunch of services that only add to the pile of things that need to be reliably operated while "just" providing one piece of my toolbox. It's just not working out, at the very least from an economic point of view. That's like that operating ...

@Vamp898 That greatly depends upon the criterias you use to measure "simpler, faster, easier". 😉 That, again, greatly depends upon the size, business, requirements of your organization. Right now, here, in example, I'm still desperately trying to hire another admin having *some* Linux experience. This position has been open now for at least two years. It's not, like, that I can choose from a set of candidates and pick the one using my distro of choice. I have to find ways to ...

@Vamp898 ... services for certain aspects seem just a next logical step here. But we need ways how to make them less "locked-up", less proprietary.

(All along with this, personal experience: Maintaining a matrix server at its current state is a broken sad mess, something I hardly would like to have to do in a reliable way for a larger structure...).