Rockford Lhotka

VP, Open Source Creator, Author, Speaker

Who Sets Up Your Cloud

17 Aug 2020

From a recent article:

Kubernetes and the many projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella are advancing so quickly that it can sometimes feel as though the benefits of the open hybrid cloud are, perhaps, not yet evenly distributed. While systems administrators and operators are having a blast modernizing legacy applications and automating highly-scalable, container-based systems, sometimes developers can feel a bit left out in the cold.

I think this is an interesting perspective - mostly because it is the opposite of my experience.

What I see is that system admins and operators are watching their world get turned upside down, and that orgs are relying on developers to “play admin” to get things like k8s up and running, because we’ve dug into it deeper than the legacy sysadmin folks.

A lot of us distributed systems developers have been waiting years (decades!) for a fabric like Kubernetes, or similar capabilities in Azure or AWS. And we’ve had to learn the ops side of these cloud platforms just so we could use the platforms to run our software.

We jumped onboard as soon as the doors were open, often before the paint was dry. And it has been challenging to work in a world where everything is always shifting underneath you. But it has been the only way to be able to leverage the cool shiny capabilities these platforms offer.

My experience is that the sysadmin world is now starting to catch up, and I can’t wait until they get up to speed so we, as developers, can quit worrying about whether our IT orgs understand the concepts of k8s load balancers, ingress controllers, etc. I want to get back to focusing purely on building cloud-native solutions!


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