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by coliveira11 hours ago |
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upvoteby couscouspie11 hours ago|
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That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
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upvoteby eitally9 hours ago|
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They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.
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upvoteby organsnyder9 hours ago|
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I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.
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upvoteby toomuchtodo9 hours ago|
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Perhaps we need bootcamps for on prem stacks if we are concerned about a skills gap. This is no different imho from the trades skills shortage many developed countries face. The muscle must be flexed. Otherwise, you will be held captive by a provider "who does it all for you".

"Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."

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upvoteby organsnyder5 hours ago|
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This might be my own ego talking (I see myself as a generalist), but IMHO what we need are people that are comfortable jumping into unfamiliar systems and learning on-the-fly, applying their existing knowledge to new domains (while recognizing the assumptions their existing knowledge is causing them to make). That seems much harder to teach, especially in a boot camp format.
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upvoteby toomuchtodo4 hours ago|
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As a very curious autodidact, I strongly agree, but this talent is rare and can punch it's own ticket (broadly speaking). These people innovate and build systems for others to maintain, in my experience. But, to your point, we should figure out the sorting hat for folks who want to radically own these on prem systems [1] if they are needed.

[1] https://xkcd.com/705/

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upvoteby torginus8 hours ago|
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Yeah, anyone who has >10 years experience with servers/backend dev has almost certainly managed dedicated infra.
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upvoteby friendzis10 hours ago|
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> and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.

Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.

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upvoteby SahAssar9 hours ago|
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> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer"

That is not true. It takes a lot more than a bootcamp to be useful in this space, unless your definition is to copy-paste some CDK without knowing what it does.

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upvoteby phil216 hours ago|
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> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer",

If by useful you mean "useful at generating revenue for AWS or GCP" then sure, I agree.

These certificates and bootcamps are roughly equivalent to the Cisco CCNA certificate and training courses back in the 90's. That certificate existed to sell more Cisco gear - and Cisco outright admitted this at the time.

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upvoteby bix611 hours ago|
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> The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.

But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.

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upvoteby bluGill10 hours ago|
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Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
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upvoteby cheema337 hours ago|
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> AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action..

The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.

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upvoteby bluGill7 hours ago|
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All the hardware and network issues are on them. I agree that you still need your own people to support you applications, but that is only part of the problem.
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upvoteby iso16314 hours ago|
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I've got thousands of devices over hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. The number of hardware failures are a tiny number, and certainly don't need 24/7 response

Meanwhile AWS breaks once or twice a year.

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upvoteby misir9 hours ago|
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From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.
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upvoteby bluGill9 hours ago|
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How many problems is AWS able to handle for you that you are never aware of though?
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upvoteby ragall1 hours ago|
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Distributed systems can partly fail in many subtly different ways, and you almost never notice it because there are people on-call taking care of them.
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upvoteby Symbiote8 hours ago|
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How many problems do you think there are?

I've only had one outage I could attribute to running on-prem, meanwhile it's a bit of a joke with the non-IT staff in the office that when "The Internet" (i.e. Cloudflare, Amazon) goes down with news reports etc our own services are all running fine.

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