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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

This is what always made me chuckle a bit. I have a half dozen friends who were sysadmins 20 years ago and today they're "DevOps".

Precisely zero have been put out of work.

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Yep. It's not like either sysadmin or devops are harder than or easier than the other... they're just different.

Actually, seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5 with a bunch of Unixy web servers behind it.

Yes, time and complexity.

Managing a switch and servers is a piece of cake compared to managing k8s, IMO.

Depends on how much abstraction you have, I have seen big companies where deploying code is basically like using Heroku. As an engineer responsible for a couple of services you don't need to know or care if this code is running on bare metal, Mesos, K8s and you care even less about the data center.

I come from this old world of managing switches and servers and today we definitely need a lot less people to run code in production. I used to work at a company with ~2000 machines in physical data centers before containerization, this required a huge infra team - I'm sure that today I could support the same workloads with half the team.

When I was a sysadmin it was definitely harder.

Devops gives the benefit of cows instead of pets, and a ton of reusable work. So I get why it's more 'valuable' from a remuneration basis.

Pets aren't that bad if your pets are a few elephants.

Yeah but how often are they elephants, and how often are they cattle that have just been neglected for 15 years?

>seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5...

or Nagios...

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