I like it much. It goes well with Premature celebration from startupers. "We raised 100M USD, we made it!", when the company is on the verge of collapse every day and is losing 100M USD per year and has no business model rather than buying something 2 USD and selling it 1 USD.
They are seen as unfortunate cost centers. They don't add new features that are sold to clients. They don't even fix the bugs the clients care about. Making the others more efficient or preventing catastrophe is invisible work.
you're going to be the "ops bitch" for the "real" programmers
Rachel is spot on about what is often wrong with IT culture; "typecasting" people for someone's convenience or to get a fancy title leads to learned helplessness and dissmissing other people's expertise and interests. I rather we all try to keep things simple and encourage people to be well-rounded engineers.
To be fair, many of them do seem to operate on the "op sees, op does" level.
Just last week, we had some mails escalating, client had "issues" with their on-prem install of our software, which ran on a dedicated VM.
I read the mail thread and turned out the database service "used a lot of memory", and they'd tried rebooting the server several times but it just kept using a lot of memory. So now they had escalated because they couldn't figure out how to "fix" this issue.
Of course, this was not an issue. The database is designed to use all available memory by default, and this was a dedicated VM so it didn't affect other services.
I've seen many such and other instances over the years. While there are certainly awesome ops people out there, which is always a pleasure to interact with, a significant amount are at a much more basic level.
As a developer, I've had to tell "ops" how syslog() works. Also, as a developer, I've had "ops" bitch because we had different config files for the service. Yes, because the service is geographically redundant, and each site had different IP address! And I, the developer, have maintained, and continue to maintain, the configuration file! Checked into your ops repo. You (ops) have never had to maintain it at all!
I've also been on the other side of the wall, as ops, having to tell the developers why the keep seeing zombie processes on the server. Because the developers had no experience with Unix signals and having to wait on child processes. And again, about how syslog() works.
* The cond macro which works similarly to C switch
* Hashmap functions like merge and merge-with
* Destructuring
* The for macro which is similar to the "for each in" statements
None of these are something unfamiliar to common programming languages so that code will not be hard understand once you go over the initial syntax and idiom hump. The syntax makes things much easier once you get to used to it, I think all Clojure programmers like it.
There is an alternative and complementary approach worth considering - instead of duplicating infrastructure in a smaller scale, you can simplify it to the simplest possible requirements needed to make your service run. Consider an old shared hosting - a single server could run 100s of wordpress websites just as well.
I cannot help but think products like DB2 and AS/400 (i Series/IBM i) are intentionally not promoted by IBM - they concentrate all marketing resources onto the next hype and view these reliable workhorses as a burden.
I am certainly concerned there is little to no on-ramp for new projects on AIX, IBMi and mainframes - there is no entry level machine and, while there are cloud offerings, they are very expensive compared to Linux on ARM or x86.
If anything, IBM Cloud should be used as an onboarding tool for their most profitable platforms.
And, if not even IBM can run your workloads on any of these platforms cost-effectively, why should you invest in their hardware and software stacks?
Having learnt k8s once, I found out it greatly simplifies things for me when I want to run new projects, even if it's single server only (there I use k3s).
Especially if there's a chance I need to run more than one client, or environment, on a given server, which is more important for "solo" enterprise than for a bigger company because I do not have money or time to care of multiple servers.
There is a subscribe (in exchange for monthly payments) button under the article, an unaddressed irony. Or perhaps news outlets need money and software shops don't?
Is this an irony? Paying a subscription fee to a magazine, for people to actually write such sharp and to the point articles (no shameless "the industry is broken! Enter my my startup. It will solve it, buy it now" articles) is really different for paying a subscription for maintenance mode 2010 software.
The margin in the former case is much lower since people need to perpetually invest time to create good content. Which is the whole point of this article - this isn't correct for the latter.
