You can’t run vmalert without flags
Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.
500 words in to the over 3,000 word dump, I gave up.
Claims to have a Unix background, doesn’t RTFM.
Nobody really uses Kubernetes for day-to-day work, and it shows. Where UNIX concepts like files and pipes exist from OS internals up to interaction by actual people, cloud-native tooling feels like it’s meant for bureaucrats in well-paid jobs.
Translation: Author does not understand APIs.
Want an asynchronous, hierarchical, recursive, key-value database? With metadata like modified times and access control built-in? Sounds pretty fancy! Files and directories.
Ok. Now give me high availability, atomic writes to sets of keys, caching, access control…
I’m ashamed enough that I can’t really apply to these jobs
This reads as “I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There’s nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken”.
Nobody really uses Kubernetes for day-to-day work, and it shows.
Wat.
Literally copied and pasted that from the article.
I know. I’m responding to the absurdity of it.
Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.
The difference is grep is a simple tool that can take in text, transform it, and output it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.
Claims to have a Unix background, doesn’t RTFM.
Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…
Translation: Author does not understand APIs.
The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you’re a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.
Ok. Now give me high availability
I would hope the filesystems you use are “high availability” lol
atomic writes to sets of keys
You’re right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.
caching, access control
Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There’s probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.
In the end, it’s not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts in a simpler and more robust way.
This reads as “I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There’s nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken”.
This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I’m wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this “cloud” ecosystem and the way it does things. It’s not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.
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Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…
[zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man grep | wc -w 4297 [zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man man | wc -w 4697 [zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool’s built-in usage information.
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Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.
Old man yells at cloud.
I’m now 30 years old and I wonder what I’ll feel like after another 30 years :(
Eh, I wouldn’t worry too much. I’m 48, and this rant still sounds like “old man yells at cloud” to me too.
It’s not age, it’s willingness to adapt.
Exactly. 25 years ago I helped manage a Sun cluster. 20 years ago I was on a team that managed roughly 3000 Linux servers in a data center. We racked them, monitored them, wrote tools to configure & manage them, etc. Ten years ago I helped manage Linux systems that were physically managed by a hosting provider, and we never actually saw/touched any of the hardware.
Today I help manage hundreds of AWS instances and also use tools/services from providers like Splunk, Akamai, and others. I haven’t seen/touched a physical server in years. It’s now all virtually managed via web portals, API’s, tools like terraform, etc.
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!”
Literally old man yells at cloud
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hating on k8s is very in vogue currently. simpler systems like ECS exist and are really good too.
anybody bitching too hard about the tools today isn’t remembering 10 years ago correctly.
love the blog! interesting stuff.
