Stateless Elastic Ephemeral Advanced Cloud Technologies

Sounds a bit like magic, eh?

it is magic - created, cultivated, maintained and cared-for by humans.

Modern software development lean into these technologies, but we often forget that behind these ‘magical’ capabilities there are a number of mundane ones that we foundationally rely upon in order for everything to work.

I rarely think about the wiring, plumbing, the foundational services/standards that my office, home, school etc rely upon.

Until something goes wrong.

This is the same with our technology infrastructure, which I hate to even refer to as wiring and plumbing because it is so much more.

Or maybe is a bit of my personal pride because for years in the 1990’s I was a system admin, (as Cory Doctorow said) "working in the steam tunnels of the information age, pulling cables, configuring machines, keeping the backups running, kicking the network in its soft and vulnerable places."

In the 1990’s under our desks we had a router, which was a BGP node for the Minneapolis/St Paul region, Matt Walsh its caretaker. This router reliably served a high percentage of ‘bits’ that were trafficked in our region for years. (Banking, commerce, communication, etc) all through this little box. (There was one hiccup because of a RAM issue, but due to Matt’s diligence it was fixed in a couple hours, few even realizing that it happened)

Facebook’s issues this week reminds me that behind all of our AI, Automation, Redundancy, Self Healing Intelligent Infrastructure, there are humans.

Someone who is dedicated to supporting our clouds.

Someone who - when our lights go off, their lights go on.

You might have missed July 29 - Sys Admin Appreciation day (https://sysadminday.com/ ), you might not even know a system admin, but you rely upon them every day.

Here is a glass raised to all the sys admins out there!

Call out to XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Cory's 'When SysAdmins Ruled the world' Short story: https://lnkd.in/eJeZnakM

Original linkedin link: https://bit.ly/3DmLidv

(worth clicking on the original linkedin Post, because the comments are amazing and often the conversation is better than the original post)