This is originally a post on Facebook.
About 20 - 25 years ago, companies such as VMWare and the Linux community invented the idea that they could use software running on a powerful computer to simulate multiple less-powerful virtual computers, so they could have many more available machines to deploy and run different types of software more conveniently and cheaper.
It created the concept of virtual machines, i.e. virtual computers simulated by software that ran on a lesser number of real physical computers.
It is all well and good. By that time, virtual machine was a very powerful tool for companies and people who wanted to have many machines with effective cost to develop, test and deploy software.
Virtual machine also allowed people to create and destroy large numbers of machines convenniently, either manually by command line and GUIs, or automatically via progammable scripts/software.
And when there are many virtual machines running in a physical server farm, a marketing term is born: Cloud.
Fuck marketing and buzzwords!!!
Cloud, simply speaking, is a bunch of virtual machines that have many different types of software installed/deployed on them to serve different purposes.
Until this point, everything was still sensible. At the beginning, clouds such as VMWare, Rackspace, Oracle on Demand, Cisco private cloud, AWS aimed at helping people to build software infrastructure cheaper and more convenient.
However, when Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure smelled money, they started to create useless services that cost cheap money to start, but eventually, when it came to production, those services would cost tens of thousands U.S. dollars a month for a very tiny deployment, and the cost from hundreds of thousands dollars to tens of millions dollars a months for bigger companies.
Even Amazon, the company that owns AWS, must spend tens of millions a month for AWS operatings/deployments of Amazon systems.
It is even more terrible that a completely new scam was born: at first, it was called SRE - Site Reliable Engineering, then later on changed to DevOps.
This is the most stupid, most insane thing that had ever been created in the whole software engineering industry (so far - later on there will be more stupid things for sure).
Yet nobody (or almost nobody) noticed that it was a scam. Almost the whole software engineering industry gets on the stupid frenzy of SRE/DevOps, which cost them anywhere from at least 6 months to Infinity to build some bullshit CI/CD, infrastructures, and cost them tens of millions of U.S. dollars to run the bullshit and overpay stupid DevOps engineers who know nothings but YAML, JSON, some Python, a few bash commands and clicking mouse.
In the name of "Infrastructure as Code", Scalability, Performance, reliable repeatability, those DevOps bullshit write YAML, JSON files nobody can understan including themsevels like monkeys, combining with searching Google, StackOverflow and now, ChatGPT, in hope that after 6 months or a years, they will have a bunch of garbage called Infrastructure. That cost billions, even ten of billions of dollars for the whole Goddamned software engineering industry.
When the docker container came, it was a much better virtual deployment platform compared to virtual machine. Without going too deep in to technical comparisions between cgroup, named thread, multi-layered filesystem and hypervisor, a docker container costs much less computing resources and starts much faster than a virtual machine.
But then, again, another scam was born: Kubernetes, a.k.a. K8s.
K8s supposed to be a container orchestra, made the coordinations of building, deploying, mornitoring and auto-scaling software on docker containers easier. But it was over-complicated, built by a bunch of pigs who were failed software engineers, could not write real software, then became DevOps. Those stupid dumb asses had no idea about real software development, used to tinker with bash script and click mouse, so they wrote a terrible overly complex system to do simple things.
The sad thing was that nearly almost the whole damned industry jumped over to K8s. Then only about 90% of them felt very very very sorry afterward, admitted that "Using K8s is the most stupid mistake we have ever made". The remaining 10% are still stuck with K8s to this very moment, spend a lot of money without accomplish anything, including not recognize that using K8s is their biggest, most stupid mistake.
Other cloud services that were built on top of Cloud Infrastructures are even worse. Companies such as Sentry, Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Splunk ...etc... are parasites of the industry. They provide million-dollar services that could be done by any half-decent REAL software engineer for a cost of nearly nothing, provided that the engineer was not mentally retarded.
If this status gets 1000 likes, I will write a book about DevOps scam and How to make Software Engineering Great Again.
Everything the stupid DevOps does nowadays can be done with much less time, cost and effort. I mean much much much less, about a tiny fraction of the stupid costs nowadays.
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This stupid DevOps scam is very similar to the scam of EJB in J2EE about 20 years ago. By that time, 95% J2EE teams used EJB, falling for the promise "You don't need to know networking and network interoperability to build distributed software", then felt terribly sorry later on. Now, EJB was dead.
Hopefully the whole damn DevOps will die soon, for Software Engineering's sake, with the empty hollow promise "You don't need to know basic Operating Systems and Networking to build software Infrastructure".
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In software engineering, the biggest lie is "You don't have to know X to do Y using Z", for example:
- You don't have to know SQL to do database access/manipulation using ORM.
- You don't have to know Networking and Network Interoperability to do Distributed Programming using EJB (or CORBA, or ASP, or .NET or whatever).
- You don't need to know javascript (or even don't need to know real programming) to write UI and backend using React (or Angular, or Vue, or whatever).
- You don't need to know Unix-based Operating Systems to build Infrastructure using Terraform (or Ansible, or Chef, or Cloud Formation, or whatever).
- You don't need to know fundamental docker to do container orchestra using K8s.
All of those statements are true to a point, and beyond that point, people will feel very sorry.
Those big lies are very dangerous, because they are not 100% lies. They contain certain percentages of truth, so people are trapped.
That is why software engineering is so terrible like the current situation.
In order to make software engineering great again, people should stop using buzztools, marketing tools, return back to fundamental Computer Science, build real practical tools.
Don't fall in to marketing bullshit of Cloud and Services Providers.
