[Kneecaps07]

There's an argument to be made for quality of life for your employees. As someone who has transitioned from on-prem server management to mainly cloud work, my job happiness has skyrocketed. I haven't set foot in a data center in three years and I do not miss it one bit.

Dealing with hardware failures, hardware vendors, confusing licensing, having to know SKUs, racking new cabinets, swapping hard drives, patching servers - it's all awful work. When you go cloud only, you can be more productive instead of dealing with some of that nonsense work.

[drdaeman]

I always was a software developer first, but in the old days I spent enough time in the server rooms doing all sorts of sysadmin work, and those days I dabble in devops.

And, honestly, I miss the old days. Today, $cloud has some weird spasms where you suddenly get an influx of connection timeouts or tasks waiting for aeons to get scheduled and you just can't log in to a switch or a machine and figure out what the exact hell is going on. You just watch the evergreen $cloud status page, maybe file some tickets and pray someone bothers to investigate, or maybe live with those random hiccups "sorry $boss, everything is 100% good on our side, it's $cloud misbehaving today", adding more resilience -> complexity -> unreliability in the name of reliability to the system. Either way, with the clouds I feel handicapped, lacking the ability to diagnose things when they go wrong.

I don't miss those three days we spent fighting a kernel panic. Was about a decade ago - we outgrew the hardware and had to get a new one with a badass-at-the-time 10GB SFP+ NIC that worked nice for the first few weeks but then its driver suddenly decided to throw some tantrums on almost a hourly basis. I don't even remember the details - a lot of time flew since then, but thankfully we found some patch somewhere in the depths of LKML and the server was a perfect clockwork ever since. That wasn't fun, but that was an one-in-many years incident.

Either way, I do feel that in the ancient ages hardware and software used to be so much more simple and reliable. Like, today people start with those multi-node high-availability all-the-buzzwords Kubernetes-in-the-cloud monstrosities that still fail now and then (because there are so many moving parts shit's just bound to fail at incredible rate), and in the good old days people somehow managed to have a couple of servers in the rack - some proper, some just desktop towers sitting by - and with some duct tape and elbow grease those ran without incidents for years and years.

Have I turned old and sour? Or maybe it's just the nostalgia about the youth, and I've forgotten or diminished most the issues while warmly remembering all the good moments?

[pojzon]

Cloud popped up mostly due to ease of use. Its a lot easier to hire cloudops engineer with somehow enough knowledge to deploy something on the cloud than someone who will be managing a datacenter and have it running.

The later ppl still do what they did, they just work for Cloud Providers making probably quite a bit more than they did previously.

IMHO its a win win situation for everybody. Less skilled engineers can be “productive” and former sysadmins have huge salaries.

[Symbiote]

In between your two extremes are colocation (no managing buildings, power, cooling, racks, security, optionally network), dedicated servers (no managing/installing servers, disks, warranties) and basic VMs.

[agsamek]

We do colocation and we have to deal with HD and ram failures from time to time. Replacement of the hardware part is managed by the provider, but discovery and software requieres our involvment.

I just wonder what happens if a ram or hd failure hits a cloud provider node. Is the architecture on average really able to come over such failures without help and intervention.

[kortilla]

This reads like a software engineer being happy work caters lunch so he/she didn’t have to cook for the whole team anymore. Didn’t anyone discuss maybe hiring a cook?

[fragmede]

Yes but soon then you're running a kitchen and then a cafe and catering business, as well as a software startup. Which, given how many startups had in-office lunch/food pre-covid is maybe not a bad way to think of that.

[kirubakaran]

Ah yes the Maserati problem https://www.quora.com/Whats-a-Maserati-Problem

By the time you're running a [catering business | massive sysadmin team], you're already a huge success. Congratulations!

[Dave3of5]

I think this depends. For OPS people no longer having to physically go into a DC I agree but you've now pushed a bunch of work developers especially now will have a harder time as they used to make code and there was someone who sorted infrastructure now the devs themselves are kept up all nights with AWS stuff going up and down.

If cloud improved QOL for ALL employees I'd agree but I think it just shifts work around and costs more.

[goodpoint]

> Dealing with hardware failures ... it's all awful work

I've met plenty of datacenter technicians that loved they work and the opportunities for growth it provided.

Some companies really know how to manage a datacenter with minimum pain. Some don't.

[BlueTemplar]

It's not like all those jobs have been taken over by automation - someone still has to take care of these cloud servers ?

[Handytinge]

> Dealing with hardware failures, hardware vendors, confusing licensing, having to know SKUs, racking new cabinets, swapping hard drives, patching servers - it's all awful work.

Each to their own, but I think you'll find there's a fairly significant portion of sysadmins who love that work!