We have a title and don’t carry mops, my dear condescending developer who ostensibly doesn’t respect the entire ecosystem of people holding the Internet, the public cloud, and your entire CI/CD pipeline for whatever bullshit you’re cooking in NPM together. Do you have any idea how many “janitors,” most basically volunteer and most not employed by Amazon, are involved in the pedestrian aspect of merely making amazon.com land at the right place?
Yes, this is a good future: who would ever want to touch the computers they operate? Better to rent computers and position the core competency of your business with a third party, right? Because you can shed some of those pesky janitorial salaries? I’ll be waiting by my phone when you’re on the verge of bankruptcy once the clouds have their teeth in your books, and suddenly I get promoted from “janitor” to “computer operator who has my interests in mind, even though I not-so-subtly malign his existence”.
All you’ve done with this mindset is drive the same janitors to work for the clouds instead and contributed to the downfall of computing as a discipline that any player has any semblance of agency within, as the people who have actually touched datacenter equipment all work for them now or sit around in horror watching as a generation sympathetic to FLOSS arguments willingly hands over the reins of owning a computer to massive corporations.
Reading the comments in this thread already shows how much of 'those' 'software janitors'[1] don't understand what is required (and how little) to run on metal.
It's not that cloud is not the right answer. But people have started to forget that running your own metal is still an option. Or with current prices and performance: even a more viable option as it was in the past, because you can do so much more with so much less.
[1]: cranking out useless features nobody ask for while looking down on those (dev)ops people.
> software janitors don't understand what is required (and how little) to run on metal
Quite. In the middle of lockdown a client needed to spin up some virtual machine instances to demo a product to a potential client. Previous boss had been pushing a cloud-only strategy using Azure and was itching to retire all the physical servers.
Problem: can't spin up any kind of VM due to lack of Azure capacity.
me: "Well, we have that [physical] dev server which we still have, we could spin up the demo stuff on that..."
new boss: "Oh, cool. Great lateral thinking!"
me: <wtf?>
Yes, this is a good future: who would ever want to touch the computers they operate? Better to rent computers and position the core competency of your business with a third party, right? Because you can shed some of those pesky janitorial salaries? I’ll be waiting by my phone when you’re on the verge of bankruptcy once the clouds have their teeth in your books, and suddenly I get promoted from “janitor” to “computer operator who has my interests in mind, even though I not-so-subtly malign his existence”.
All you’ve done with this mindset is drive the same janitors to work for the clouds instead and contributed to the downfall of computing as a discipline that any player has any semblance of agency within, as the people who have actually touched datacenter equipment all work for them now or sit around in horror watching as a generation sympathetic to FLOSS arguments willingly hands over the reins of owning a computer to massive corporations.