This article is very ironic: it is written by the CERN's Ombud, who has a lifetime employment contract like all of CERN's management, and probably obtained it at a time when CERN was printing them like hot cakes. Today's reality is much different: the chances of obtaining this contract are very low and mostly depend on older colleagues retiring, otherwise you are limited to a 5 year staff contract. The disconnect between the Ombud and the people she talks about is striking, for example when she describes them as "obviously disoriented" for refusing to get into the career grind.
IMO, it's not silly at all. Most devs have to know the commands and configuration to do rolling deployments on the target infrastructure, fetch logs, how the readiness protocoll integrates with automatic restarts, ingress, etc.
With k8s, all this is standard and transferable. With ad-hoc simpler solutions, this is all per-team tribal knowledge, and in my experience it's not even simpler to use for us devs.
> Most devs have to know the commands and configuration to do rolling deployments on the target infrastructure, fetch logs, how the readiness protocoll integrates with automatic restarts, ingress, etc.
Is this serious? You think _most devs_, meaning a group that includes FE devs, mobile app devs, IoT, open source, DBAs, security engineers, need to know these things?
> With k8s, all this is standard and transferable. With ad-hoc simpler solutions, this is all per-team tribal knowledge, and in my experience it's not even simpler to use for us devs.
Most teams do not have to manage most/all of the things you're describing.
This really feels like more K8s marketing disguised as a HN post.
Yes, it's serious for _most devs_ who have code that could run on k8s: back-end devs. And _most_ devs who touch anything in FE, mobile apps, IoT, DBAs also have to touch the corresponding back-end and its associated platform tooling where k8s is a bliss compared to all the team-specific stuff we encounter in the back-end.
Now I agree that k8s is a nightmare for the infra people who run it, but honestly it is insanely comfy for the (back-end) devs who need to use it.
> Yes, it's serious for _most devs_ who have code that could run on k8s: back-end devs
What an impactful little nuance to leave out of all previous conversation :)
> And _most_ devs who touch anything in FE, mobile apps, IoT, DBAs also have to touch the corresponding back-end
I do not agree with this statement at all. If your org is large enough to use K8s at scale, your mobile devs aren't touching your infra. Being aware that infra exists is not the same as modifying and managing infra.
> Now I agree that k8s is a nightmare for the infra people who run it, but honestly it is insanely comfy for the (back-end) devs who need to use it.
If your BE devs involvement in K8s is cloning a repository that may or may not contain a directory of k8s config that they never open, yes.
Mine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging.
I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.
My university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.
Those fees they charge the international students did go somewhere, then :-D
I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor).
Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster.
> Sometimes I even wonder why variable assignment has to precede the assigned expression.
I think there's a good discussion to be had on preferring either prefix or postfix operators, but the answer to this question (which is also the answer to the question "why are we so accustomed to prefix keywords?") is easy: because ALGOL did it.
Hardly natural because the site where the binding is introduced follows the expression that uses the binding. When you type from left to right, editors will highlight that unknown binding until after you bind it.
I wonder if a fix to many "too big to fail" and "winner takes all" market and public/private power imbalance issues, isn't simply this: mandatory split up beyond a certain size.
