Comment by SoftTalker
3 years ago
I manage hundreds of servers, and use Ansible. It's simple and it gets the job done. I tried to install Kubernetes on a cluster and couldn't get it to work. I mean I know it works, obviously, but I could not figure it out and decided to stay with what works for me.
But it’s specific, and no-one will want to take over your job.
The upside of a standard AWS CloudFormation file is that engineers are replaceable. They’re cargo-cult engineers, but they’re not worried for their career.
> But it’s specific, and no-one will want to take over your job.
It really depends what's on the table. Offer just half of the cost savings vs an equivalent AWS setup as a bonus (and pocket the other half) and I'm sure you'll find people who will happily do it (and you'll be happy to pocket the other half). For a lot of companies even just half of the cost savings would be a significant sum (reminds me of an old client who spent thousands per month on an RDS cluster that not only was slower than my entry-level MacBook, but ended up crapping out and stuck in an inconsistent state for 12 hours and required manual intervention from AWS to recover - so much for managed services - ended up restoring a backup but I wish I could've SSH'd in and recovered it in-place).
As someone who uses tech as a means to an end and is more worried about the output said tech produces than the tech itself (aka I'm not looking for a job nor resume clout nor invites to AWS/Hashicorp/etc conferences, instead I bank on the business problems my tech solves), I'm personally very happy to get my hands dirty with old-school sysadmin stuff if it means I don't spend 10-20x the money on infrastructure just to make Jeff Bezos richer - my end customers don't know nor care either way while my wallet appreciates the cost savings.