Angry customer (😤): Your software is still too slow!!!
Me (🙄): It's running good all in all. Let's divide this into smaller aspects. Which steps do you need to perform faster?
😤: Every step needs to be as fast as google!
🙄: But our software ain't google, not even to mention your infrastructure
😤: Everything needs to run in 2 seconds!!!
🙄: You aren't helping in any way. We need something to grasp...
😤: It's all your fault.

📴

Me: "I'm a programmer"

Others: talks about linux
Others: search algorithms!
Others: service infrastructure
Others: memory optimization
Others: encryption

Me: "I'm a front end web developer"

Others: complex services
Others: strong user form validation
Others: lazy loading
Others: SEO

Me: "fucking, I make shit look pretty alright"

We are transferring our infrastructure to Google cloud and Docker. Last week one of our frontend developers tell me:
But it works without Docker!

This is a really helpful diagram of how the Linux infrastructure is laid out :)

I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!

This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!

Yeees! Got my contract for the time after my apprenticeship. 4 days/week and a shitload of 💰, from my point of view. 36k € per year.

Additionally I got the position I wanted, I'm responsible for the whole infrastructure and the conversion of our app from Winforms to WPF.

I'M HAPPY AS F*** xD

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

Oh boy, my fellow devRanters, I just signed an 4 digit monthly salary (that's a lot in Lithuania) job contract, I'm a future Unix infrastructure engineer :o

As per original concept of ranting, it's been almost two months since I wrote for the stickers and didn't get a reply >:(

Scheduled devRant maintenance - I'm going to be upgrading some infrastructure later and there will be some downtime, probably about 15 minutes, around 9pm EDT. Apologies for the inconvenience and devRant disruption :) It will help with working towards an even more stable service in the future.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!

Writing more infrastructure than product.

Look, my application requests and transforms data from a single external API endpoint, it's just one GET request...

But I made an intelligent response caching middleware to prevent downtime when the parent API goes down, I made mocks and tests for everything, the documentation is directly generated from the code and automatically hosted for every git branch using hooks, responses are translated into JSONschema notation which automatically generate integration tests on commit, and the transformations are set up as a modular collection of composable higher order lenses!

Boss: Please use less amphetamine.

Hours spent on application development: 8
Hours spent on tackling shitty infrastructure: 48

beginner coder: figures out how to write a feature

average coder: knows a few different ways to write a feature. but not quite sure on which one to use.

master coder: meditates before starting a project. closes his eyes to map out the entire infrastructure of the project.

god coder: gets paid ALOT of money to guide people on the right to do it.

A beautiful collage....

It's so annoying! One of the developers just started explaining to me some of the recent changes in the infrastructure. I made these changes! I know about them and can explain them better than he did. I tried telling him that I already know but he just wouldn't stop. It felt like he was mansplaining. I don't usually get that at work so it was weird and frustrating.

When your team has no time to address technical debt/infrastructure improvements but we need to make that square checkbox round immediately.

CEO calls the Android team in for a congratulatory speech. Likens us to tower builders in the age of cellular tech, building the infrastructure of something great. Then finishes his talk with “and when they were finished, they fired all the tower builders”

I think he was trying to joke, but it sure as hell didn’t feel like it.

A colleague approached me today and said - "Why are we using Linux? Windows server is clearly better. We need to migrate our infrastructure"

I'm generally not someone who gets too caught up in opinion - but shut the fuck up. There is no way we're going to adopt Windows server because it has a GUI and you're too shit to learn how to use a console.

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me that another colleague has done this in his web application for a subject:

For checking user and password, he did not query a database, but instead he checked information in a HIDDEN DIV in the html page.

Reason: "this way I don't lose my precious time".

I think of that and I'd like to punch him. People like him are the reason websites in Italy suck and my University web infrastructure sucks (he worked as intern on that).

My. God.

The joys of being the sole developer and sysadmin of a service with hundreds of thousands of users.

Just spent a couple hours with my family. In that time half the infrastructure died and the service became unstable.

Best of all is that I seem to be the only one getting this so called "java.net.UnknownHostException: System error" exception.

The face of confusion my boss made when I suggested the development of a simple "api" (one end point) to solve a particular issue we faced after improving our infrastructure made me realize I need to abandon this ship...

He really can't wrap his head around calling a URL and doing something on a server although that's what we do every fucking day...

!dev
I am about to move into my own house. Yay. But every ISP I called is very insistent that there is no house there.
"Are you sure you entered the right building number? The entered house does not exist." Yes it does! And it has existed since 1912...
Stupid Germany with its stupidly bad internet infrastructure. I guess that's what you get for privatizing the network.

Current work project is microservices architecture out of 4 - 8 components.

It is fully Infrastructure as a Code automatized. I just change somewhere code, git pushing

And it automatically invokes Gitlab CI, terraform, ansible, kubernetes helm charts.
Auto checking itself with unit and integration tests in autoredeployed staging env. Then it saves tested results to docker registry and asks for one button verificating click to be rereleased to prod.

I just go for drink or eat food. While all the stuff is happening.

And I am proud that all the infrastructure, backend and frontend I made on my own.

I don't need to remember how to Deploy it. It is all automatized

I've been fired today and somehow it was an relief :)
As I know that I am pretty much the only one who knows how the infrastructure works and I am the only one who actively tried to get the company to a better level of coding (tests, code reviews, proper deployment / continuous integration,...) It somehow feels like that gif.

Has anyone ever donated a website and its maintenance/hosting to a charity?
There's a pet rescue/homing RSPCA centre near me and their website is terrible. I keep thinking about doing this for them.
Thoughts?

Hello devRant, a question for you.

I'm looking to redisign/setup my server 'infrastructure'.

It'll exist out of:
7 vps's (6+gb ram/500gb+/100mbs up/down per vps)
2 dedicated servers running as virtualization servers. (16gb/4tb/1gbit up/down and another one but let's leave that one out for now because it's gonna take a shit ton of time to solve that clusterfuck)

One server will function as an entry point for all websites I run, multiple database servers and multiple backup ones.

Any advices/tips/ideas?

Just a very serious hobby thing :)

It pisses me off that germany has no proper mobile reception fucking anywhere near rural areas.
And don't get me started on railway lines.

Also Telekom is just garbage.
We pay full price and get less than half of the data we're paying for.

Fucking hell rant over.

*looks for jobs in system administration*

For our client in $location we're looking for a Network and System Administrator ... to manage our local IT infrastructure (so far so good) ... that's Microsoft-based.

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

Requirements: deployment and maintenance of servers, backups and storage, updates, yada yada.. fine with me.
yOU wiLl mAiNtAiN WanBLowS sUrVaR sYsTeMs

Fuck that company too.

Does anyone here in Belgium even work with fucking Linux servers?! Or should I really relocate to the Netherlands to get something decent?!!

interviewer: name something basic
me: your crappy ass bootstrap php5.4 website you call a “cloud data infrastructure”
interviewer: oh that’s very basic indeed

So apparently this guy has the infrastructure for the Linux kernel mailinglist archive sitting under his desk.

And then there was a power outage.
While he's on vacation.
Now, someone has to physically go there to enter a LUKS passphrase to let the system boot again... 🤔😂😂😂

Sometimes I don't understand people.

I just blocked some of the top management from connecting to our WLAN because I was testing a verifing feature for said WiFi that kicks all devices not listed in the DB.
It happened while my boss/senior/guidance was trying to show them the advantages of a centrally managed infrastructure.
He covered my ass well and tried to sell it to them as proof of a secure solution, that unknown devices couldn't log in.
I feel like human trash right now, but that's what you get for testing in production.

How to comply with GDPR on any website and web application:
- download the law and store it in some folder
- if you have money, pay a lawyer and a security consultant to write something about GDPR. Download reports and papers and store it in some folder
- Don't touch your code, nor your database nor your infrastructure. If you don't have anything encrypted, leave it like that.
- Write somewhere a popup that says: "we are fully compliant with GDPR". If you have still money left you can also buy such a popup.
- DONE.

Some time ago a salesman tried to sell me a super revolutionary solution. He introduced it with "today everyone will tell you that in order to save money you must move your servers and IT infrastructure on the CLOUD (big emphasis on the word) but we offer you a different approach: 'the on premise cloud'"
😶"so, you're basically telling me to replace my local machines with other local machines?"
😎"you don't see the whole picture: It's the cloud but INSIDE your company"

Am I dumb and I didn't see the obvious technology leap he was offering me?

My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.

Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)

The reason: it produces too much heat.

My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?

Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑

So I work as a "Web Development Lead"
Which means I lead (frontend,backend and infrastructure teams)
Also I am in charge of infrastructure or devops or whatever you call it, which means I handle production issues, dev and staging environments,...etc

and I am a team of one, and today I asked for a day off because it's my wife's birthday

and suddenly everyone is blocked, everything is on fire, and the phone is not stopping ringing, I had to go out of the cinema theater to answer the non-stopping calls

I AM ASKING FOR A SINGLE DAY, A FUCKING DAY, EVEN IF SOMEONE IS BLOCKED SO WHAT IT'S NOT EVEN A DAY I ONLY NEED 6 HOURS

IS TO TOO MUCH FUCKING TO ASK

Theoretically I can build multicloud, geo reudant, load balanced, auto scaling infrastructure. But most of my workday I spent in outlook writing E-mails and arranging up meetings.

Client wanted a website to offer rentals for her collection of student rental properties. She was adamant and stipulated that it had to be the Rightmove of student lets. I asked her if she had a £million plus budget for the marketing and then some for the infrastructure and mobile app development. She disapeared. Months later I checked the URL she had purchased and it had been done as a free site on wix.com and was a dreadful piece of shit. You just know instinctively that a client is going to be worthless.

So, the company I’m working for is finally merging with its sister company. That means budget for upgrading our infrastructure. And guess who volunteered to be in charge of it, and future sysops. That’s me.

Previously we haven’t had anything close to a sysops, and our servers has been neglected and never updated nor upgraded since 2012. We even had a Windows Server 2012 running with rdp wide open...

New router, 2x the speed 🤟

New router, 500 less on bank account 👎

Things you don't want to see at night
Ripped out of Netflix-Mode by a Warning notification and currently monitoring further development
Green line is temperature, blue humidity. Temperature rises at ~1°/10min, but seems to flatten just now. ~0.6°C to go and I'll have to head out. I'm thinking one of the ACs failed, but states are fine. Never trust a single information source for critical infrastructure guys

Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope

I think that's the thread dump of my brain currently.

Anyone knows what date and time we have?

I'm so lost right now.

17 projects atm thanks to e.g. Microsofts Exchange Hell.

I. Hate. Everything.

Go spread your butt cheeks so I can give you two fists of love before you write a damn ticket regarding yet another (security-) problem in infrastructure.

so I had a very important video conference for some rather large cloud infrastructure that Im engineering. I decide to look "smart" so i decided to wear a jersey during the video call. I aced the meeting, happy people all round. I walk to my room and my wife says "you do know your jersey is inside out...and back to front..and the label is sticking out from under your chin....How did the meeting go?" me:"..fine until you pointed out a look like a 2 year old dressed me !" ... well thats one way to kill the happy feels!

So there it goes again,,, I am thinking about quitting again.
I feel that I cannot be the sole sysadmin for a company whose critical IT-infrastructure lives on Life-Support, deprecated software and hardware, and the unwillingness to actually invest it in.

The online funeral live stream just broke. The 4G* connection at the place is awful, which is probably the reason for it...
*If it even has 4G now, it definitely didn't a few years ago

Germany keeps jerking itself off how amazing our economy and science is. We're a country of engineers and all that.
Yet our digital infrastructure is a fucking joke.

Rural area? Well better hope you'll get any reception, let alone 4G.
Oh and cable connections? I've seen areas that will give you a 6 Mbit/s DSL connection.

Full stack programmer on the recruitment post vs reality

Requirements written on the recruitment post: Frontend Development, Backend Development.

Reality: Frontend Development, Backend Development, Devopts, Infrastructure, UI/UX Design, Video Editing, Design, Customer Service...

Me: Full Stack means everything

Holy fucking shit.
I just read an article about Barton Gellman, one of the journalists that wrote the snowden articles for the Washington Post and one of the 3 that got contacted directly by snowden.

It seams like several intelligence agencies tried/succeeded to compromise his infrastructure.
His iPad got compromised through an RCE exploit.
The turkish intelligence service tried to compromise his laptop by tricking him into installing a customized RAT.

Like fuck man, I can't imagine how it is to be targeted by pretty much every government there is.

My boss is letting a really strong bus factor grow around me.
I try to show them how to do things but they really can't wrap their heads around it and I keep improving our stack/infrastructure ...

The kitchen at my office is pretty small, it fits a max of two people. Today morning while making a sandwich, an infrastructure dev walks in and proceeds to say... "I hope you don't mind me standing behind you, it's really not a Christian thing to do"... what?

On call at 2100. Call at 2101. Co-worker off at 2100, call at 2059. Neither were problems with our infrastructure. They were with the callers' teams fucking up.

There’s no better feeling then doing a full server rebuild, modifying several projects heavily to be portable and keep working under new infrastructure and loosing access to dependent systems.

Migrating everything across, firing up Apache.... and BAM the fucker just works and ssl labs gives it an A (it was a giant F with multiple vulnerabilities yesterday on the old server)

Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

Damn hackers! Within the course of a week, the internet of my country has been DDOS-attacked three times! Last week the attacks came from Russia or China". Yesterday they came from Russia and Ukraina. Is this a part of the Russian military exercises Zapad 17? Well, when an important part of the infrastructure is down and thousands of civilians are affected, it's for real and not an exercise.

Go DevOps :)

A client is like: Help! We got a 500 in our wordpress administration panel and there is no error in the log, it must be your infrastructure at fault!

So I calmly replied to them that wordpress handles its errors on its own, and without the appropriate debug flags enabled, doesn't log it anywhere. Even mentioned that a PHP app can change the error handler no problem, and linked them to both, PHP and Word press docummentation.

Didn't hear from them since.

You just knew the DDOS attack that impacted Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, Disqus, PayPal... Would not have a chance to slow down devRant! Guaranty @dfox has a world class resilient infrastructure built to circumvent and to scale.

In other news, I have been forbidden by my boss to implement any security or performance improvements into the company infrastructure as this holds no business value. Furthermore, passwords are not to be a random alphanumeric+special-chars string but something legible.

Please stop putting critical infrastructure to the internet. Security on the internet is a joke, and we won't be laughing the time when someone dies from a cyber attack on another pipeline/dam/weapons factory.

!dev

What kind of a motherfucking city is this! (Mumbai) Every fucking road has a shit ton of traffic and no one gives a shit about people walking nearby. An asshole drove over my foot while I was crossing the road, motherfucker. Traffic signals not working, no traffic constables to see anything. And people talk and keep telling this is the spirit of Mumbai. Shitty infrastructure is the spirit of Mumbai. Fuck everyone!

Working for a startup:
"Two weeks? I'll build you the entire platform, draw illustrations, animate them and set up the infrastructure"

Working for a massive corporation:
"Two week sprint? Obviously a team of 10 people can't do more than just check the existing code."

0: Monitors and Graphic's Cards become affordable for us poor graduates

1: Node bloat becomes a thing of the past with WA or has auto-minimize functionality to keep only essential code

2: North American internet companies all go out of business due to free super high speed infrastructure maintained by a trust of communities and elected delegates

not all "dev" related per se, but my current day to day gripes answered

Security!

Offensive and defensive at both code and infrastructure levels.

So many times I see devs not give a flying pancake about security. Whether it be rolling integers for sql injection or permission guarding to prevent someone executing something they shouldn't.

Why is security in this industry always the last thing to be concerned about when it's the first thing that's going to kill your business.

😓

Client: There is currently no way for us to save forms to “the cloud” (yes they actually put the cloud in quotes)

Me: That would be because this software is installed on your onsite server infrastructure and is not cloud hosted in any way.

Just had my first insomnia night, I simply could not fall asleep! While laying in my bed I had great ideas for work and for my home projects, like new features, infrastructure and even implementation details. Now that I'm up I can't remember most of it, of course!

Worst part about it is that when I got to bed I had about 5hrs to get some quality sleep, now I got non it feels like. Fuck.

Can anyone relate? :/

Don't question my infrastructure setup. I ssh into server A because it's the only one available from the outside. From there i ssh into server B to ssh into server C. C functions as a router and allows me to ssh into D, E, F and G. I could go from A to C directly, but OCD.

Management (origin India) have been recruiting many developers from my country in Africa so as to facilitate lower pay, amongst other reasons. And today, I was told, in a suggestive but ordering tone, to start getting paid by project done, whereas I’m the head of VoIP and built the infrastructure from ground up prior to app launch.

All features(calls in both directions, voicemails, power and predictive dialer, voicemail greeting, call forwarding, etc) done already.

I was told this by a non-programming personnel.

I once single-handedly developed an entire drag-and-drop ui for creation, provisioning and control of virtual datacenters and all its infrastructure. Other people developed backend and database and the whole project took about 10 months, but about three weeks before we had a working, stable release the company decided to cancel an entire project.
We thoroughly researched the market, and at that time there was no better such solution. We would have made something extraordinary.
Especially because it worked with VMWare.

It was probably Microsoft Excel as part of backend infrastructure inside financial institution.

As far as I remember there was some spreads configuration and price feeder inside excel.

They said a "t2.medium DB Instance" was enough for three production systems...

Overheard: "I'll need to get in touch with my Infrastructure Architecture Innovation Team"

😂🤣😅😂🤣😅

Why not just call them team buzzwords. Omg.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

the kind of issues our it department have

Yesterday one of our clients gave us the OK to launch their annual financial reports, 4 minutes before stock market closed and most of us was heading home.
Problem was we didn't have the proper access to their servers, so I and a senior consultant just spent a few hours calling our client and their IT infrastructure provider.

6 hours later, a large bill from the IT provider for after hours work, the job was done. A job that would take 5 minutes of uploading and 5 minutes of database transfer.

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

How to write bug free code:

while True:
try:
_loop() # all logic here
except:
print_excv()

This will not cause any difficulties ever. Remember to pipe output to /dev/null, make this script a critical but undocumented part of your infrastructure and tell no one about it.

Dev: Hey infra guys, our backend time to first byte takes 8 seconds! Can you guys investigate?

Network team: Oh yeah that's normal, we don't investigate anything below 30s, that's our SLA 😎

😵

When I can see actual clients using my software, and can get real feedback from them.

I usually work on backstage projects and my job never really affected "real, normal users". When I have something pushed and can really see user feedback and smiles, that means I've made it.

Of course, if that's on a decent job, with a decent team and decent pay. Which is where I am at now.

Soon, the app will be released - if the external infrastructure guy stop sucking. So, I'm hoping to feel I've made it soon, real soon :)

When a marketing / sales person says in a meeting with executives that our current infrastructure can handle 300.000 new customers easily. (We're at 90 ATM).

Mfw I'm the techie in the room and aware of our non-scaling mysql DB.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

When you ask your infrastructure admins for a firewall rule and you are very specific. They say that you don't need it... you troubleshoot for 2 hours then argue with them for 5 hours. Then they add the rule and it works. I want to punch someone right now and have a beer. FML!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

--- s3-r-w.us-west-2.amazonaws.com ping statistics ---
44 packets transmitted, 16 received, 63,6364% packet loss, time 43544ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 258.995/280.765/377.149/37.359 ms

Sounds like a good day to grab a ball and go outside.

Most web developers don't seem to care at all about ecological footprint and UX/UI impact on people and society, like they never cared about accessibility either, desperately dreaming to work for the Californian oligopoly companies that shaped our current digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, rivers run dry, forest are burning, people starving and soldiers killing people.

But politics is taboo, even on devrant. Let's post a funny thank-God(?!)-it's-Friday GIF animation instead!?

What kind of people do we want to be?

!rant

Sometimes I think about packing up my bags and just going into security consulting just to get away from the world of being an infrastructure anarchist for software companies that are overvalued "Export to Excel" generators.

Any senior types out there find that you’re losing your coding “chops”? I’m involved in so many OS/Middleware upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, status meetings that I can’t code to save my life anymore. I can review and guide design, but I struggle to generate new code. I can get a new dev going really quickly though - is this just a natural progression or is it game over for me? I feel like if I had to get another job, I’d be very unsuccessful. They call me a leader, but I think I’m just a slave.

It's been broken in production for two weeks, and you want to tell me it's "drop everything urgent" now? Is it important? Yes. Is it urgent? No.

Also, how the fuck did you not know this was broken for two weeks, and what the hell do you want me to do about it now? It's your codebase, it passed all the tests in staging AFTER I made my changes to the infrastructure.

I’ve been out of steady work for almost 2 whole months now but things are starting to look up...

I’m super stoked for some potential client projects!!! I have one client that wants me to completely rebuild their businesses infrastructure, PC refresh, server upgrade, network overhaul for 3 sites, and more. This new client has a business partner with another side business and wants to discuss potential work/projects. And I’m going to be discussing a potential contract deal on Thursday to develop a custom software for another client.

Guys! My startup is starting woot!!!

So today I found a file share containing some super super sensitive information accessible to what I think was our entire user base (6,500 users) if you knew the server name and had an interest in nosing around.

I reported it to our head of IT and heard nothing after, although 5 mins after reporting I could no longer access...

I suspect the infrastructure lead is going to be a dick (because his one of them awkward non team player kind of guys) and not thank me for preventing our company from being in national news papers... but try to spin it on why am I nosing around his servers in the first place..

I actually feel 50/50 about if I should of told or not.. but on flip side, I guess the access logs of me listing the files as I flick through to confirm my suspicions would of caused s bigger headache.

Fucking useless infrastructure engineers!

Hearing that a company plans to digitalize the entire business model and move away from bureaucracy 💪

Hearing that said company plans to run the entire infrastructure on an iMac in the office 😨

# Honestly, no intention of starting a holy war;

Been a Linux guy for over 9 years spanning school, college and my previous job years;

Now I have to use Windows at my new job. I know very little abt this os and it has never been among my strong skills (only used it for gaming);

What's more intriguing is that my current company's entire infrastructure is Windows based - which I had no idea that it could be possible at such a large scale;

I don't know about what I feel about this whole thing. But what I know is that I don't wanna shy away from it. I love the job and the role (only just if it was Linux, it'd be perfect).

Just need this for a future reflection:
Can anyone confirm if it's the same with other investment banks/financial services institutions etc. infrastructure?

Someone blocked access to AWS RDS database and for the past few weeks I can't access the database from my machine when connected to our company network.

Created support ticket to internal IT team and someone closed the ticket. I re-opened the ticket and in the comment someone wrote "Their team doesn't handle AWS access".,

Wrote email to the director of infrastructure and that asshole replied to me asking some questions and after that his been ghosting me for past 2 weeks.

I'm tired and I don't have energy to do any more follow ups.

Massive cyber attack hits Europe. Hopefully everyone is patched and secure. Critical infrastructure, banks... impacted.

What is your home network infrastructure like?
Ethernet or is everything WiFi? Is there a dedicated firewall? Servers running on a raspberry? Do you have VLANs configured?

Back in Germany, the land of fast cars and slow internet, where rich people preach austerity to prevent improving any kind of infrastructure. How can a first-world country in the heart of Europe suck so badly when it comes to connectivity and train travel?

Cross the border to any other country in Europe and you will notice immediately because suddenly the web just works as it's supposed to be...

!rant

Remember the time when I couldn't go to school because they were upgrading the internet?

THEY DELIVERED
200 megabits down, 200 megabits up. And guess what - NOTHING IS BLOCKED!

YAS

Thoughts on forced emergency support?

I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.

I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.

I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.

Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..

Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.

What the actual fuck?

Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..

#confused and #annoyed

Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?

Thanks.

Webapp that organise it-infrastructure-data with visual representation

Company wants to change to a different cloud provider because of credits :/
Thus rebuilding the infrastructure from ground up.

Worst part is Azure sucks.

I help maintain software that services thousands of users across millions of dollars of infrastructure.

My resolve is stronger than steel during a production outage.

Plex goes down for 1 minute at home and my toddler loses it, and I'm a fucking wreck.

Wtf is wrong with me?!

here i go again, trying to convert my entire backend infrastructure to docker images on a sunday

FML

🤡

Please don't tell me the mobile app is a priority when the whole IT infrastructure has been handled by fuckface interns who had not a single fuck to give about documentation or commenting their shitty code that strangely reminds me of a drunken Jenga game.

The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?

Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.

I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..

Almost..

I am a web developer and assigned in a project as Infrastructure Engineer AND Penetration Tester because no one is available. I survived that hellish experience, i learned clustering and other advance stuff on my own, studying even late at night, no training..just youtube videos. PM (who is currently has little to no involvement in this stage) has very little appreciation in what im doing(research, server estimates, diagramming, documentation, planning)

Day 1 of migrating the entire companies infrastructure to GCE...

Thought It wouldn't be too difficult migrating the db until I found out the 480 triggers and 42 stored procedures are a no go.

I mean I know they right and the db layer should be about storage only - I even remember thinking "This is a bad idea" when I wrote most of them but fuuuck it's going to take weeks to refactor this. :'(

I love when a project puts a dependency on infrastructure that has not been implemented internally and have no idea if it will work. *sarcastic voice*

Not much of a SQL Dev, still an apprentice and had a basic run throughs. Client needed a migration script to run, which I was assigned. Took me a good 6/7 days to make, transfer over a secure (and VERY slow) network took 2 hours. Infrastructure 3rd party took 2 days to clear and run. After all that process. I then realise, I left the fucking rollback in

Get 4 certifications: AWS cloud architect associate, CKA, RHCSA, RHCE... Start working towards RHCA in infrastructure

An important lesson I learned:

When upskilling yourself and taking notes, make sure you do it on your personal laptop because when the time of contract termination arises, you will have to sign a waiver that you can't keep any of the data you saved on company infrastructure (including cloud). And then you lose all your notes and possibly knowledge. lol.

I find this concept so annoying. Even in college they said that anything you write down is property of the university.

Best:
Huge update and refactoring on my private infrastructure (gigabit lan, ipv6, new vpn architecture, new dns, new mailserver and much more). And there is no more microsoft in my little kingdom :)

Also i stumbled over devrant ;)

Worst:
Still a lot of unfinished projects, more and more problems at work because of lack of concentration. Been diagnosed with adhd this year, so at least i know the source of my problems, but it still hurts to fail :(

Best wishes for 2017++ to the devrant community!

I fucked up my MySQL installation...

AGAIN!!

Whenever I really feel like programming in my free time (which became really rare), I fuck something up and spend half of the night fixing it. Once it’s fixed I’m done, don’t wanna do anything anymore..

I should just start programming and set up the infrastructure afterwards.. at least I would get to do some programming then..

Am I Data Engineer or Software Development Engineer ?

I design the infrastructure for analytics data, and I build the infra entirely including an development. Except making reports out of the data.

What I'm supposed to be called ?
Data Engineer ?
Software Development Engineer ?

Definitely not an Data Scientist. Official designation given by company is Data Engineer II. But what I'm ?

Confused, someone help me please.

I have a saying that always gets me confused looks at work: “More is more”. What I mean by that is every time management asks for a new system, that system needs to be built, maintained, upgraded (code and infrastructure), etc. My point is that new systems are not free of cost after delivery. Am I alone in thinking that way?

AAAARRRGH!!! I wanted to rant! I wrote a huge text! I got really furious about it! Then drove through some area without Internet, looked something up in the browser, returned to devrant app - and THE FUCKING FUCK TEXT WAS GONE!!!

That makes me even MORE ANGRY!!

Technical meeting

We were at technical meeting a while ago, they discussed our infrastructure implementation, all was good.

Then some motherfucker of our technicians, suggested that we should move to bitbucket, I fought fiercely to don't even think about leaving bitbucket.

Suddenly the cock swallowers bosses agreed to bitbucket, they submit their changes.

10 min after the meeting i broke into the biggest boss room, gave him my resignation letter, I just told him, signing your acceptance to move to bitbucket, you should sign this too.

Boom, assholes.
I'm free now.

Week end prayer for Infrastructure folks...

Let's say you have a business that is 100% gonna get canceled from lots of internet infrastructure services because reasons. Let's say you decided "Screw it. I'm gonna build all my own infrastructure and services from the ground up and deliver all my digital content to millions, including broadband video, apps, gaming, devices, etc."

A) Is that even remotely possible?
B) If money were no object and time were not of the essence, how would you do it?
C) How could that even scale at all if thousands of other businesses did the exact same thing?

PSA: Don't chase shiny.

Serverless stacks are fast, easy, and cheap... until they're not. 75% of the way through an implementation when the company started to realize that we would be done by now if we continued to use our own infrastructure.

I hate infrastructure prima-donnas. "Prove the thing you haven't built yet won't use too many resources!"
Seriously, buddy, get a real job. Provisioning hardware is a software problem now. Help or get out of the way so we can deliver.

*Writes CloudFormation Template.*
*Launches Stack*

Starts Murmuring,

"The cycle repeated
As explosions broke in the sky
All that I needed
Was the one (JSON Invalid Format :| ) thing I couldn't find
And you (Teammates) were there at the turn
Waiting to let me know

We're building it up
To break it back down
We're building it up
To burn it down
We can't wait
To burn it to the ground

Me: "FML :| "

We heard you like security so we put antivirals in your docker containers despite the fact that we made you have antivirals on your machines running the docker containers.
And we won't allow to use root just in case you want to disable the av. And we don't care you need it for the docker 😂

This is how I was played when wanted to use docker containers to avoid dealing with OPS.

Some time passes, my team is going to have independent cloud infrastructure.
Doing corporate politics is challenging...

I write web apps that show system health information, for support purposes. Whenever I talk to my boss about the general direction of what I'm writing he says, "I want one page that shows me everything."

This is an enormous company, with tens of millions of customers, and an infrastructure so big that there are literally millions of potential points of failure.

I hear this from management softs all the time: one page that shows me EVERYTHING. To me, that means he wants a red or green indicator that he can quickly check on his iphone while he's skiing.

I'm afraid that managing this kind of infrastructure is a bit more complicated than that. If it was that simple, you wouldn't have anyone to manage.

A few months ago I applied for an IT Support role managing computer systems for a smaller manufacturing corporation. Now some back story, I'm a recent college grad looking for work and this hit my radar. I did well in the phone interview and really enjoyed the in person interview as well.

However, if I was offered the role I'd be the only person working on their infrastructure. The person who I interviewed with was leaving and thus his position was available. It was kinda strange to interview with the person you'd be replacing.

I started asking questions about their critical infrastructure and how they manage it. Short answer is they don't know.

I asked about off-site disaster recovery. "Oh we back everything up to a 2TB disk and I take it home every day."
I asked "What if that backup fails?"
Their response was "That would suck."

The company decided to go with a managed IT solution instead of me as I don't have the required experience in their eyes. The previous guy left because they we're stuck in their ways.
Yah, no thank you.

I am excited about all of the AI blockchain technology using IoT running in the cloud, as a service. It has all of the bells and whistles -- big data, hyper converged infrastructure, seamless integration, a sleek dashboard with everything in a single pane of glass. On top of all of that, it's future proof!

How hard it is percieved by management to do something in code is proportional to whether or not it's a task that sales or the CEO wants, versus what the developers need. Developers want to rewrite something, or fix infrastructure? Too much work can't justify it. Sales wants to clone Google Search? We'll expect it by next month.

My company is supposed to be 'remote friendly'

Any request to work from home is a fight to get approved, regular days frequently get cancelled for vital meetings and best of all our infrastructure is so shit the VPN drops silently every 5-10 mins. Good luck doing a big merge or getting latest code.

Our metro system spend as much in salary and infrastructure designed to make sure you pay tickets than the money from the actual ticket sales.

So basically you're paying tickets to have bareers and controllers. And then you pay taxes to run trains.

It's fucking racket.

After migrating to the new infrastructure, here is our first week without unexpected downtime!

Company Infrastructure Team: We are doing away with proprietary libraries and using standard Java instead.

Also Company Infrastructure Team: Here have a fuck ton of new proprietary libraries with dozens of nested dependencies. Oh we don’t use Maven by the way because we are fucking idiots.

One down side to working for a smaller company: the never-ending fight against infrastructure.

Has anyone had any experience in using Microsoft Azure for website hosting infrastructure? Would you recommend it?

full drupal site build in 24 hours.

6 hours design
6 hours infrastructure
12 hours build (including custom modules)

Ask to get DB back ups done, contact DB team => cant log in => have 2 contact wintel team => they believe a reboot will sort it => contact customer => permission to bounce given => contact team to bounce => shifted back onto DB team => bd team open lync conversation about bouncing => no reply to mails if all is well in the world => sit at desk cant start dev cuz know will be sucked into aroganizing this brewery piss up with a bunch of bums....... cue putting on headphones and blasting some music at 11 ,,,,,,,,,,,, been waiting to deploy for 4 hours !!! FML

Please share C++ advice for devs new to the language. What do you guys think is the fastest route to self learning C++ development for infrastructure systems and please suggest resources.

Switching to a new server provider the day before a sprint and thinking that turning it on qualifies as the server being "set up".

I have had a meeting with "CTO" of pretty big factory. I was suppose to propose a new cloud solution for existing Sharepoint application. Unfortunately we didn't get into any agreement , because the dude only accepts SharePoint solutions and when I started talking about the cloud, he literally went nuts. He later have told me that he has been working here for over 20 years. The technical staff of that factory is just him and some other young guy and they only task they doing is to maintain complex Sharepoint infrastructure. If we hosted application in the cloud, he would lost his job.

Been working on AWS for about 8 months. Always looked at Cloudformation like an Alien thing. Never thought I'd be the one diving into this Rabbit hole.

But now here I am, 3rd day, trying to Automate the whole infrastructure of my App via Cloudformation.

Phoning salespersons:
Me: "we need a new VoIP solution for our office."
Sales: "we're certified"
Me: "we need a new VoIP solution for our office."
Sales: "YOUR WHOLE IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS OUTDATED, UPGRADE ASAP!"

This is why I prefer mails so much over telephoning.

Heroku before Salesforce: we can assemble the exact infrastructure you need in just few clicks

Heroku after Salesforce: we can’t assemble a web page layout.

Guys,

I'm in kind of crappy situation. We are in dire needs of some improvements to our infrastructure. I've told that to the person who is responsible for it several times to get it improved. But because of his incompetency or laziness he just do some hacky solutions which gonna blow up on the the very next day and makes things worse.
I've raised my concern to my supervisor several times. He is also kinda slow in pushing things.
These infrastructure changes are for testing purposes so it doesn't have an immediate impact on their business. But it is kinda productivity killer for all.

Jesus our security infrastructure people are stupid. They are telling us to secure a service that we don’t want accessible directly by the role “member” setup to be accessible by “member”. All because they “don’t want us changing identities in the middle of a chain of web service calls”. They are like “don’t worry, the fire wall keeps them out”.

That’s like saying “here’s the key to the bank vault, but you won’t ever get past the security guards so it’s okay that you have it.”

I swear this company is stone stupid.

As I dismantle the infrastructure for a now dead project I once worked very hard to main, I find myself oddly emotional about it. I can't help but feel a since of loss. Goodbye friend.

Since early 2016 a LinuxDev at my work, pushed me (windows admin) right in the CentOS world. With some practise I had to build a infrastructure to deploy Ubuntu to development clients (laptops with stuff without windows) In perspective I had to migrate this infrastructure to my team (windows admins) and run it there as were this all the time our business. I loved powershell but for some reason I have had to learn Ruby, bash etc.. Now I am the first Admin with some pretty skills in Linux, my workplace comes without any version of Windows. I am flying with Debian, Ubuntu, redhat and CentOS. The finished work from past enabled my team and me to drop fully automated Linux Clients for our developers.

Well last weekend Windows 10 fuc*** up with the creators update and destroyed even my USB3 ports... I didn't even spend lot of my time playing with this machine... So my desk is now running arch.

That day my colleague thought, windows isn't my passion is thanked every week once for directing me in this pretty good world.

Today I am still the first Linux DevOps in my team, but still happy.

Network (people not infrastructure)
My first programming job was because of someone I knew in college worked there. Strangely he also got me my fourth programming job.

My fifth job was a recruiter. First time that ever worked. But it does work.

The biggest thing to remember that in an interview you are selling yourself. So you need to understand a little of sales and marketing.

Infrastructure took away our read access in S3 to data that we own and our ability to manually delete/upload to S3 in that prefix (which we own). Without waiting for us to confirm that we have alternative means to read and change what is in there. And I had no warning about this, so here I am doing a midnight mod on an existing solution of mine in hopes that I can finish it before tomorrow morning for some legal reporting deadline.

Things would be so much easier if the infrastructure team let the emergency support role have those permissions for emergencies like this, but they didn't. I guess "least privilege" means "most time spent trying to accomplish the most trivial of things, like changing a file".

So easy to DOS a whole software company.
Someone (accidentally) started a script or similar, generating so many requests on StackOverflow that our IP got banned.
In the company chat people already joking how they cannot work. This is "critical infrastructure" in 2018: faulty IP in our network is taken offline. Let's see if we can access SO again today.

Company after years finally moves away from the ages old and buggy chat infrastructure to use HipChat, which gets adopted quickly and is loved by everyone...
Now Atlassian announces to discontinue HipChat. ;( *sadpanda*

At least we might be able to move to Slack now. :)

I'm setting up an project at work. Takes me until now 2 days and there are dozens of undocumented things I couldn't know.

It's an total brainfuck of product. Most of it could be automated and be less error prone.

How can people do that? Don't they hate to do it too? I cannot understand why they didn't change anything there for years.

Either Java legacy support (even AI doesn't want to do that) or helping the German administration to finally upgrade their IT infrastructure to Windows 7.

module.rke2.hcloud_server.worker[3]: Still creating... [12h31m25s elapsed]

hmm...

It has been 3rd week since QA env isn't working, because of some problems with infrastructure and I still cannot convince the client to move all apps to the cloud. He still believes that Azure or AWS will be less reliable than theirs IT. Ye right...just image that your VM is down for 3 weeks on AWS...

I live in a college, sort of..
2 hours ago, the power was lost unexpectedly for less than a minute and then came back. Internet didnt tho.
They dont handle their own infrastructure in this college thingy, they hired a school to do it (it sounds fucked up, and it is a little fucked up).

Now little me is becoming impatient and offers my help. Gets rejected.

Additionally, i just started to have a fair sleeping schedule, and noe because the internet isnt working im about to fall alseep before lunch again.. i hate the people responsible for IT here..

> client has no infrastructure of the project
> dev like me still work on it
> I constantly request for mock-ups and infrastructure
> client never responds back, instead he raises issues ahead of sprint
> I snap back at him
> Client wants call now
> What the fuck

To be honest, I'm gonna take a stand here...fuck this shit man, no clear way of working

Spent three days banging my head against my desk trying to get an AWS Lambda function to work, only to finally discover that my code was perfectly functional and it was a security group problem. It was supposed to send a POST request to a load balancer's URL but couldn't resolve the hostname because the security group blocked a necessary outbound port for DNS requests.

That's what I get for not troubleshooting at the infrastructure level when experiencing connection issues. I did not spend two years doing tech support just to forget basic troubleshooting steps now that I'm in the DevOps field...

If you could remember that I'm not your staff anymore and stop assigning me to projects. That'd be fucking swell.

I'm meant to be infrastructure now so fuck off. Oh a devs leaving let's hand the project to the infrastructure guy who's fucking leaving also!!

Fucking genius. I'm so close to just to saying fucking swivel and walking out. Fuck the notice period.

Worst part of being a dev:
Having to go through a week long battle with the infrastructure team to do what I could have done in 5 minutes.

When you use that piece of infrastructure you build for weeks for the first time and it saves you so much time.

Infrastructure as code, platform as code ... What's next life as code 🙃🤔

I know local dev is hard in a complex system, but if tooling prevents you from working for an entire day something is seriously wrong.

Serious question, which language would Iron man rather code in? The billionare genius may have too little time to write his whole infrastructure in C/C++. My bet is on Python since it provide every feature a super hero, who has lots to do might need

Career advice question.
I am soon to finish my apprenticeship as an infrastructure technician but about half way through I found my love in coding.
I have played with fundamentals of c#, js, css, python and java.
Where would you guys recommend looking for honing my skills?
Cheers!

Was invited to interview by agent for 1yr contract position. Was accepted for permament position with bigger salary instead. Now I’m an Unix Infrastructure Engineer

My school is awesome, their network infrastructure is so secure (not),
that you can easily control other people's desktops with Windows' basic tools.

*-- There's something kind of child like and adorable about working for a client who spends THOUSANDS of dollars on their data infrastructure, yet finds it ever so difficult to provide ONE user to help reconcile and test the new data warehouse.

So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.

We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!

Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).

I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.

Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.

My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.

And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"

Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?

Watch your shell. Someone did it again.

Sysadmin grilled s3 with a typo in his command, shutting down whole subsystems of amazons infrastructure

Started new contract recently, their main product is aiming to be some kind of automation holy grail for business, basically low code nonsense integrating with most of the industry standard tools like sap or confluence. Their entire infrastructure is setup manually, slowly transitioning from on premise to AWS. No infra as code, no playbooks, not even scripts, just "engineers" painstakingly clicking the UI. They don't seem to see the irony of being automation company that doesn't use automation, but I'm having a good laugh at least.

Few things hack me off more than devs who can't be bothered to do a task properly, so just submit some random crap as a PR that looks half correct at some surface level in the vague hope it gets approved.

This team is about creating decent, tested, reliable, resilient backend infrastructure, and we need to trust devs in order to do that. If you want to pull the half-arsed, do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible approach then sod off to higher management somewhere.

A fried of mine got a post-doc in a university abroad.

Apparently they have their whole infrastructure self hosted.

And I'm here, unable to degoogle my phone due to uni requiring google's stuff.

Can someone explain to me what is meant by, "full stack," nowadays? I see posts by people saying they're, "full stack," but don't know anything about Linux, networking, databases, or daemon configs.

How can you possibly call yourself a full stack engineer if you don't know anything about infrastructure?

Work day 3 of 2023… gawrram I’m bored. Another day of IaC. Unfortunately the issues I’ve dealt with today are sequential from the QA point of view. And our QA is slow us fuck today. So a lot of waiting around for me today. I’m one fucking issue away from the Great Infrastructure Update. So close, yet so far, knowing how slow our QA process is…

So here I’m sitting around in my office away from office pondering what the hell I should do with all this time…

It's somewhat nice here. The thing is we have a lot of infrastructure problems and it's hard to implement business here which made it hard to find a job. But if you're working with US clients, it's fine. Internet access and electricity is not reliable, but you can find a workaround.
As a consumer of digital services, it's weird as we're pretty close to the US (2 hours flight) and there's not an embargo against us, but payment processing services won't touch us (legalization is awful for them), so good luck paying with any local issued card. And if anything is country restricted, we're right next to Cuba (Again, legalization). Paypal, Spotify, iTunes, most of Netflix, a few cloud providers.

Yeah, that's it. Right next to the US and no embargo and willingness to learn other languages (Easy to find French, English and Spanish speaker), but with big infrastructure problems (Internet and Electricity) so you can be really qualified and not get a job.
I'm in Haiti.

I find still very funny that Desktop outlook (So Microsoft) doesn't support MFA from Office 365.

I'm kind of tired to tell user go and geerate "app specific" pass which bypasses MFA.

Specially when even default Windows 10/11 mail client supports MFA just fine and fucking faster than outlook.

This is the part of my job I hate : Administrating users, search how to make thier PC/MAC work (Btw Mac client does suppoort MFA ironicly).

Can I just get back to Infrastructure, redis caches, step in Q# ? .

What all are the infrastructure related issues you face in your organization day to day?

Parking issues.
Unhygienic washrooms
Cooling / Blower
Internet connectivity
Coffee machine sucks
Broken/Uncomfortable chairs....

these all our mine :( , add yours :D

Tomorrow i have to go into the office and work for 8 hours for $0/hour, building a project that includes backend in java, bash scripting, ci/cd and building the whole devops infrastructure and deploying that backend on cloud provider through terraform docker kubernetes, aside from being tested in theory for those 8 hours in-person,

all of this as a form of 1 technical interview after which they will decide if they move forward with me or reject me.

Do you think this is fair?

Question for my fellow devs:

Do you feel like you are spending too much time on maintaining ur devops/infrastructure rather than focusing on the actual product?

Do you think your company would be willing to spend a bit of money to outsource scaling problems to someone else and just focus on the product?

Ik we got lots of fancy new CI platforms like Circle CI GH actions etc but like I personally feel like I’m doing certain infrastructure tasks twice when I look at the two different codebases I work on.

Infrastructure as Code is all fun and games until you end up needing asymmetric environments (as in, staging contains different services to production, that kind of thing) for cost-saving reasons...

as a seasoned systems eng myself, i had huge mental block of "i am not a programmer" whining when starting to incorperate agile/infrastructure as code for more seasoned syseng staff.

leadership made devops a role and not a practice so lots of growing pains. was finally able to win them over by asking them to look at how many 'scripts' and 'tools' they wrote to make life easier... and how much simpler and sustainable using puppet/ansible/chef/salt... and checking in all our sacred bin files and only approved 'scripts' would be pushed thru automation tool after post review.

we still are not programmers or developers, but using specific practices and source control took some time but saving us loads of time and gives us ability to actually do engineering

but just have 2 groups of younger guys that grew up wanting to be the bofh/crumudgen get off my systems types that are like not even 30... frustrating as they are the ones that should be more familiar with the shift from strictly ops to some overlap. and the devs that ask for root now that they can launch instances on aws or can launch docker containers and microservice..... ugggg. these 2 groups have never had to rack and stack servers, network gear, storage... just all magic to them because they can start 50 servers with a button click.

try to get past the iam roles, acls, facls, selinux and noshell i have been pushing. bitches.

So, my university has a mandatory community service program where basically students are sent to help developing infrastructure and society in undeveloped parts of the country. I and my team are going to depart in the end of this month.

We're going to help raising IT-literacy level by teaching high school students basic programming with Scratch or Python. Is that too much? Should we just start with teaching Ms. Office instead? Or do you guys have any opinion?

>where is the code that is in charge of that?
>that's the infrastructure dependencies job
>oh cool. So what if I want to do X Y Z?
>the infra doesn't do that
> well who is on charge of infra?
>oh that was {guy that left 2 weeks ago} and anyway that code existed for AGES

So now I'm drowning in foreign spaghetti because people didn't want to disturb the holy infra and just made workaround in the services themselves. Good thing I got my nylon overalls for maximum shit protection

I am so fucking tired being the handy man that solves every problem that arises from a disgraceful project management.

I was minding my own business when a project was handed to me two weeks before the production rollout. In this project they needed a ton of integrations with the destination system and nothing was done.

So naturally I started to ask where were the integration specifications and what infrastructure was supporting the project so I could start development right away.
There were no DEV nor QA infrastructure, only production, and no one could give me a straight answer about what exactly they needed to do. That alone was a huge red flag but the kicker was that I could only start when the software provider development team finished the configurations of the system that they wanted to integrate with. After reviewing the due dates I only had 4 days to implement the integrations before the rollout.

During those 4 days I was constantly on the phone trying to get enough information to implement everything in time. After an immeasurable effort I managed to implement every critical component for the rollout.

So fucking tired of this shit.......

Was busy with Terraform and infrastructure/cloud topics during the last months. Now I want to start coding some tools and apps again. Can't find a point to start with. Also I think that I am just too lazy to boilerplate everything...

!rant

Just ran a terraform configuration to set up my infrastructure on digital ocean

My god i'm in love

The company where I work decided to create their own cloud infrastructure. On Wednesday, our instances were down until almost 4pm. Today, so far same thing. I just want to work :(

One month ago I had to start a school project with some my classmates. I managed all the infrastructure using terraform and today, the day before the delivery, I noticed that the graphs used for the monitoring always been so quiet. I decided to ask my team what was going on and these are their replies:
- "I thought IaC was more describing the actual infrastructure"
- "I didn't know we have a database on AWS, I always used my local postgres instance"
- "Why do we need to host our web app on AWS? I can just run it from Visual Studio"

I don't think I want to live on this planet anymore

So I was checking out Scaleway home page, and they said: Gitlab use their infrastructure?

Is it pure lie or gitlab really host something there? And why would they do that if they use Google?

I don't know what to trust these days lol