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"I see the progress when we cam from manually maintained machines, to clumsy devops tools, to more streamlined dev tools like ansible, to kubernetes, and with each new step, maintaining a system requires less and less expertise." As someone trying to be primarily a dev who keeps getting roped into doing ops stuff for deploying my stuff, my experience is the exact opposite, and in particular putting Kubernetes on the end as the least complicated technology seems outright crazy to me, like, seriously, what on Earth are you talking about? You literally can't bring up a hello world web app without basically knowing everything you needed to know to bring it up on bare metal, and everything you needed to know to bring it up on a VM (whose crazy virtual networking stuff now seems like simplicity itself compared to Docker/Kubernetes), and everything you need to know to bring it up in Docker, and everything you need to know to bring it up in Kubernetes... and you need some sort of solution around building Docker images, too, so you're still going to need to know that, too. There's all kinds of reasons this is necessary and there's all kinds of reasons why provising a new hardware server, blasting a Linux distro on to it, and just running your server is a bad idea. By no means am I proposing we need to go back to some glorious past, where losing a single hard drive sector means "oh well, guess the database is gone! recovery plan? Our recovery plan is to not need the database anymore!" I'm just saying, it's crazy to think this is all getting simpler. Try looking at this through the eyes of a fresh grad sometime. Granted, I'm a bit crabby that literally every time I go to deploy something new, on a roughly 18 month time frame (the intervening time being maintenance and feature development), I have to go learn something else for my one-off task. (I don't think devops manages to beat the Node/JS world for churn, but it's probably in second place.) But still, it's getting more and more complicated, not less, and I don't even sense that we've passed an inflection point on the complexity reducing yet. |
Those "all kinds of reasons" aren't necessarily valid, though, because it's not actually possible to go back to that caricature of the past that you describe.
The reason it's not possible is that some things actually have gotten simpler, at least from a user's perspective.
Automatic bad-block relocation has been standard for effectively forever. Even line-speed hardware RAID has been affordable for so long that it's not even a question. Hardware, in general, is routinely villified as being a nightmare, when the reality is that it's boringly reliable and, more importantly, has predictable enough failure rates that there are simple, standard engineering solutions around the failures (often already baked in).
That "inflection point" may well just end up being peeling away all the abstraction layers to discover that simplicity underneath works just fine, since we don't live in the 20th century any more.