To give a history of myself, I've been a Linux nerd for a long time. When I was young I was entranced by computers. I would sit for hours writing useless basic on my father's Tandy TRS-80. It was his because he'd take it with him when he went out of town. It was a portable version.
Then we got a real computer at home and I was amazed by it. I'd play on it constantly. Games mostly, but back in the late '80's early '90's getting anything to run required a basic understanding of Dos and eventually Windows 3.11.
That eventually evolved to Windows 95, 98, etc. I was often super frustrated that when something would break with my computer that I'd have to call the manufacturer just to figure out which driver was the correct set of random numbers and letters in order to get my hardware working after a reinstall of Windows.
I always knew there had to be something better. In the late '90's I bought a boxed copy of Slackware from my local Circuit City. I could never get it to run, because I didn't know what half the values were even referencing and probably still today couldn't figure it out.
I then saw a Red Hat Linux boxed copy and figured I'd try again. I easily got it running on an old machine I had. Then that was it. I didn't know what to do with it.
Games wouldn't run on it. Every application I was taught in school wouldn't run on it. So it was fun, but personally for me, it was useless.
Jump to 2007 and I was about to graduate with my bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice. I decided that games weren't a necessity and I'd be willing to give them up to be free of Windows.
It was an absolutely mesmerizing experience. Everything I knew was basically useless and I had to relearn everything. I absolutely loved it.
One day while I was at college, they were being hit by a bad virus that was flying around the network. A friend said I should shut down my laptop and I just laughed and said I wouldn't be affected.
I had fallen in love with Linux. I graduated in 2008 right as the market crashed and I decided to pivot back into computers and went for a Master's degree in Computer Information Systems. I wanted Linux to be my career.
I've been on Linux since that time in 2007. I've given my life to learning as much as I can about it, and I still love it.
Now I'm at the Federal Reserve in IT, and I feel absolutely useless and so under valued. I'm in a group that doesn't do much, but we're supposedly Sys Admins.
When I asked my manager the best way I could contribute he recommended I learn Terraform. Sure, why not? I had learned Ansible while at Red Hat, how hard can it be.
So I've been looking at Terraform, learning on acloud.guru, and honestly, I absolutely despise it.
I have to learn yet another new language, that pulls runners from Terraform's repository, that aren't even supported by the vendor, to spin up on AWS, just to run some code.
The latest Terraform lesson had us using Docker. So I'm writing Terraform (a new language to me), to pull a Docker runtime (that isn't supported by Docker, but is on Terraform's repo), to pull a Docker image (on Docker's repo), to run on AWS (which we have no control over), to run some code.
This screams to me that no one values a sys admin. Everyone just wants to run the code and not be responsible for managing their systems.
It's a very sad state I've found myself in. I absolutely hate this. I've wanted to surround myself with open and free tech and be able to dig in to the deep levels of how it works.
Instead I've found myself paid very well, to do very little, and I honestly hate it. I hate where this career is going. This is just another example of we'll pay for everything and own nothing.
We don't control the Docker images. We don't control the Terraform providers (aka runners is what I think of them as). We don't control the hardware.
With SAS we don't control the software.
If a bad actor inserts themselves into ANY of these levels, we won't have a clue. We own nothing and we're supposed to be excited for technology?
This just says to me that sys admins aren't valued and that code is king.
I'm just an old man yelling at the Cloud. Very tired of this shit.
This is why I love the Fediverse. I can run my own stuff and take responsibility for me. I can own my content. Own my software. Own my digital identity.
I'll keep moving forward, but holy shit things have to change.