Oppugn.us

By Zed A. Shaw

Yes, I hate the word "cloud" too. I'm just as annoyed as any of you by this trend of using some dummy catch phrase to sell something. Words like "2.0", "microblog", "checkins", "service", "enterprise", or "cloud" seem to infect the technology and journalism industries like little moron viruses blinding everyone to mountains of bullshit being used to sell technology to managers who know very little about technology.

However, I absolutely love the idea of the cloud. You know why? Because it means the death of the Bastard Operator From Hell once and for all. The days of that entrenched system administrator who does nothing more than hoard knowledge in order to keep his tiny little kingdom of power managing a few machines in some half-assed manual ssh-poking manner are over.

We all know this guy and absolutely hate him. He actually doesn't do shit until his fucking little house of cobbled together perl script cards collapses. Then he's running around in a panic, sshing into boxes manually, hacking away at configs guessing at what might be wrong, and barely getting things up and running again with no plan for preventing it in the future.

Each machine is different from the next. Nothing is documented. There's no password database. None of the configuration files are under version control. Automated deployments? Hahahahaahahahaha. Oh he doesn't fucking trust "automation". Says it causes too many errors (unlike his fat fingers).

Ask yourself this:

If you went to your sysadmin and said you wanted 64 more machines in the next 5 minutes could they do it?

That's right, this is the new standard for system administrator competence. Not, can he add a mother fucker to the LDAP without crashing the whole network. Nope, he has to compete with companies like Heroku where a very nice little control panel has a slider that you just slide up and poof more machines. In fact, Heroku claims to have 58 thousand running apps at the time I wrote this.

Your group of jokers have hard a time pushing a new css file to one web server.

The cloud should just be marketed as "Replace Your Jerk Sysadmin". Go look at Heroku, and tell me that isn't a damn sexy control panel. Tell me that you get anywhere near that level of professionalism and service from your system administrators? If you do count yourself lucky (and consider starting a side business like Amazon).

What's happening right now is the system administrator is being replaced by nothing more than the three following events:

1. Normalized application layout and deployment standards.
2. Economies of scale.
3. Programmers hating system administration.

First, we have the fact that many server side applications are now organized and structured so they're consistent and easily deployed in an automated way. Java sort of started this, but the cream of the crop is the gear Ruby on Rails peeps have. I remember fondly the day I replaced a BOFH with 10 minutes of my time and a capistrano script. Ah good times.

Throw into that companies like Google and their AppEngine successfully dictating even your database to streamline their deployments and you can see the trend going even further. Today any "app server" that requires pointy-clicky-mousy work is dead.

Second, there's just pure simple economies of scale at work. BOFHs really screwed the pooch on this one because, by being difficult and fairly incompetent they opened the door for a whole world of businesses that bring simple economies of scale to wipe the BOFH out. You see, it's just cheaper in the long run to pay some company who has to treat you well than it is to deal with some asshole who doesn't give a fuck about you. Economies of scale means that someone else can focus on just being awesome at hosting your shit while you do whatever it is that actually makes you money.

Third, programmers are very slowly chipping away at the need for a CPU babysitter by implementing software that automates even more of your IT systems. Software like Chef and Puppet do a good job (not great yet) of managing huge numbers of machines. In fact, a lot of the cloud services use those two or something similar to manage their machines.

Of course, I know not all system administrators are incompetent power mongers ruling over a pathetic bash shell kingdom. Some of them are on par with the quality you'd get from a cloud service. But, if they don't get their shit together soon I see them being relegated to the deepest darkest corners of the internet working for the government.