[OT] Is the IT Crowd re-inventing Unix with Virtualization, Docker and Microservices?

Tue Sep 11 20:43:13 UTC 2018

I'm not sure my comments are useful here. But if nothing else, I think
they will give a unique perspective on the whole issue.

I am not an IT professional. I used to be. But I am not anymore. I'm a
fiction writer. I run FreeBSD on my desktop and the only thing I really
do with it is write fiction in Emacs. Why FreeBSD? Well, there are
several reasons:

1: UNIX was originally designed for text processing. This makes it
great for any writer. You can do things from the command line on text
files that Microsoft Word can't even dream of doing.

2: Excellent documentation. If I don't know how to do something, the
answer almost always exists right in the FreeBSD handbook.

3: Great community support: If I can't find the answer in the FreeBSD
handbook, I can ask a question on the mailings list and usually get an
answer in less time then I'd spend on hold trying to get an answer from
Microsoft.

4: Consistency. FreeBSD continues to follow the original UNIX
philosophy of simple things should be simple, simple tools should be
able to be used as building blocks for more complex tools, etc. There
is no systemd crap that has so much hidden magic I can't possibly hope
to understand what is going wrong if something isn't working. With BSD
init, I can easily trace the problem back to the source.

So I agree, thanks so for much for FreeBSD! Even as a non-technical
user, it provides exactly what I need. An OS that I can customize to
work the way I want it to, an OS that is stable and reliable, and an OS
that I know isn't going to change so much every year or so that I am
forced to learn entirely new ways of doing things because someone
decided "This init system is better than that one because it will shave
one or two seconds off the boot time," or whatever the latest fad is.

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 15:10:16 -0400
Alejandro Imass <aimass at yabarana.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I guess it's time for another food for thought email of like-minded
> FreeBSDers, as I am coming to a new conclusion about this whole
> enterprise crap world of which I am so evermore fed up of...
> 
> For me it all started with a comment about Theo de Raadt's visionary
> comment here, brought to light by Ian Smith in 2017:
> 
> https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=117621+0+archive/2017/freebsd-questions/20170820.freebsd-questions
> 
> At the time I was going through Java / AWS hell so I posted this rant
> which was followed up by interesting and diverse commentary:
> 
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ml-freebsd-questions/bMlBTj4Xx_Q
> 
> And now I have been recently exposed to the pinnacle of enterprise
> crap: microservices.
> 
> Not saying that they are not a good idea, on the contrary, they are!
> But is this all really that new??
> 
> So modern-day microservices rely heavily on virtualization (Linux on
> AWS), pseudo-virtualization (Docker), and well, the microservices
> themselves.
> 
> They bring on a whole new set of challenges such as log unification
> (usually through something like Elastic Search, Log Stash, Kibana,
> Beats, etc.), and IPC (through an MQ su as Apache Kafka). Plus a
> whole new pile of shit that they are throwing at this microservices
> "architectures" such as Hystrix and of course, everyone needs to be
> "streaming" so they throw in stuff like Spring Reactor or RxJava,
> "new" Actor design patterns like Akka (actually invented in 1973) and
> well, whatever other thing that Netflix or Amazon use, then everyone
> else has got to use them too.
> 
> Read any book on the subject and well, cry. Talk about layers and
> layers, upon layers and layers of crap, basically to achieve
> something like, well: Unix, TCP/IP and HTTP.
> 
> So let me breakdown a few of these things so you get what I'm saying:
> 
> Reactive Streams: a new FAD designed to handle "back pressure" and
> vertical scaling by taking advantage of multi-core CPU's and
> low-level caching issues etc. Well, guess what, enterprise idiots:
> that's EXACTY why you want a solid Operating System that sits on, and
> it's fined tuned to that specific real hardware! and with regards to
> back-pressure, old school protocols such as HTTP have had things like
> 503 and RetryAfter header from their original design!!
> 
> It's so funny that most of these things are for multi-core
> optimizations that are not even running on real hardware!
> 
> Log Unification: well how about a little education on RFC 3164 and Log
> Analyzer?
> 
> Virtualization: isn't this what Unix basically is? I mean the concept
> of processes that are running and sharing resources is that not
> virtualization by principle?
> 
> Pseudo-Virtuzalization: Isn't this what chroot and BSD Jails do? Oh
> you want an easy interface like Docker, well how about EzJail?
> 
> IPC: Isn't that what pipes and SYS 5 IPC provide: an MQ, Shared Mem
> and Semaphores? Oh too slow? (really? compared to what?).
> 
> And finally the crown jewel: microservices. Well, isn't this one of
> the basic design principles of Unix? I mean tiny little things that
> talk well to each other to build big things with?
> 
> Honestly I could go on but I thing you get the idea. It seems that
> this whole "enterprise" industry has been hell-bent on re-inventing a
> big, bad, ugly and expensive version of Unix, just because they don't
> want to tie their design to Unix? For portability? to what?, well to
> another flavour of Unix called Linux, running on Xen and well, Linux.
> 
> Is there are real proof that all this microservices crap is really
> that much better than individual processes (e.g. built with sh, Perl
> and/or C) running on a fined-tuned Unix system on real hardware?
> 
> Oh yeah, that's right, high-level guys are too expensive? really?
> compared to what? to the dozens and dozens of mediocre "coders",
> "devops", "techops"and whatever other "ops". Yeah, we are way more
> expensive but we are 50:1, maybe 100:1 compared the median in the
> "enterprise" side of things.
> 
> Steve Jobs was so right about the "dynamic range"of A players:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh7ikSQwKg
> 
> Anyway, that's my rant of the year ;-)
> 
> Thanks so much for FreeBSD!!
> 
> 