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After a few decades it's no longer a baby ;)

Software is becoming more complex and moving faster than ever. 'Controlling your dependencies' was always an illusion and a trade-off at best. Often a trade-off against security, inheriting the folder of JAR files from your predecessor and such.

I think of containers and all these new tools as designs which are supposed to help us manage existing complexity. They don't create it, it's already there in the requirements and real-world deployments. The friction we feel, is that some of those tools are not very good (yet), but maybe better than the previous generation (sometimes). On the negative side, there is a lot of nostalgia ("ah, do you remember bare metal...") and unwillingness to change and learn.



I think a lot of folks who have been through a few tech cycles just see us building the same tools over and over again adding complexity to the overall system.

I think the main cause here is, ironically, the fact that businesses keep trying to remove sysadmin (as a discipline) from the IT value chain and replace it with subscription services. Sure, you can do it, but at some point things will break and you need someone who understands what is happening at the lowest levels of abstraction.




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