Posts tagged ops

Dec16

No Knobs

ops databases | comments

Current systems were built in an era where resources were incredibly expensive, and every computing system was watched over by a collection of wizards in white lab coats, responsible for the care, feeding, tuning and optimization of the system. In that era, computers were expensive and people were cheap. Today we have the reverse. Personnel costs are the dominant expense in an IT shop.

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Jun28

CGF (Cascading Global Failure)

ops | comments

My partner Orion Henry coined the term Cascading Global Failure, or CGF, to describe a type of catastrophe situation in production software deployments. (The term is inspired by the movie No Country For Old Men, in a line spoken by Tommy Lee Jones as he surveys a scene of mayhem and carnage early in the movie.)

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Nov22

The New Generation of Sysadmins

unix cloud ops | comments

Mark Mayo describes how the profession of sysadmin is changing:

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Mar02

Sysadmin vs. Programmer

ops | comments

I’ve spent much of my career straddling two worlds: systems adminstration and programming.

Sysadmining is the world of unix, processes, filesystems, daemons, networking, and servers. Sysadmins are all about getting hands-on: solving a specific instance of a problem, rather than the entire class of problems. You could call this ad-hoc and shortsighted. You could also say that it’s just being pragmatic and realistic: solving a real problem, today, right now.

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