Comment by yard2010

4 hours ago

I was in the same boat as you until I needed to learn how to use it in my $dayjob. It was like discovering a new continent. I couldn't care less about it before, but the moment I realized it's a kind of cloud OS I was astounded by how this thing is genius. It's the kind of thing that gives you dopamine rushes when you use it. Something about how there is a solution to every problem you didn't know even mattered turns it into a magical perfect software. I just love it.

There is something special about complex systems that just-work(tm)

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yard2010

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jdub  3 hours ago

This is the initial endorphin rush you get when wielding a complex system. The feeling changes when the complexity explodes in your face.

  • mystifyingpoi  2 hours ago

    Well said. The rush is when one understands the loosely coupled control loops and how they work together... until something fails in the middle with no error.

johnvanommen  1 hour ago

> the moment I realized it's a kind of cloud OS

The foundation of this is thirty years old:

Mark Andreesen founded a company to do what Amazon did: Loudcloud. This was cloud computing, BEFORE AWS was public. Loudcloud was founded in the nineties; AWS opened its APIs in 2006.

Loudcloud failed and became Opsware. Opsware was server automation.

Its competitor was Bladelogic.

Luke Kanies, from BladeLogic, founded Puppet. Puppet was open source, and steamrollered over nearly every installation of BladeLogic and Opsware in existence, because you can’t beat free.

Folks from BladeLogic migrated to jobs at DCOS.

DCOS was steamrollered by Kubernetes, the same way Puppet steamrollered BladeLogic.

The author of the piece predicts that open weight models will steamroller everything next.

I fear he’s right.

I worked for Opsware and BladeLogic.

I watched it happen in real time.

Financially, Andreesen’s wealth stems from Opsware. He is known for Mosaic, but Opsware put him on the map, financially. HP bought them.

If one wants to follow in Andreesen’s footsteps, study how he did it at Opsware.

Conveniently, there is a book.

“The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”