[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Friday, 10 June 2016 16:56:38 UTC+1, David Froble  wrote:
> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
> >   If you're 
> > doing fifty or five hundred servers or if you need rapid updates due to 
> > security vulnerabilities or other serious issues, you're in deep 
> > sneakers.   And most everything here is only going to need to happen 
> > faster.
> > 
> > *This* is app stacking and containers and sandboxes.
> > 
> 
> This is not the world I live in, and so I must admit that any views I have just 
> aren't applicable.

Don't worry too much. The fact that "devops" was mentioned in a
non-ironic way means that it's not the world many sensible people
live in. The UK IT rag The Register has taken quite a bit of flack
in recent months for its apparent devops obsession. The flack isn't
all from dinosaurs like me (and like you?); some of it is from people
who have been told that devops is the company way forward, and who
then find that reality doesn't match the marketing, devops alone
doesn't fix everything and make the tea, and worse still, cluelessly
broken system designs are still cluelessly broken system designs
(which can be continuously integrated and tested and deployed using
shiny tools which don't fix the cluelessly broken design).

As you said in another thread a few minutes ago, developers aren't
necessarily the best deciders of what technology to purchase.

A decade or two ago, developers were very very important in some
quarters; e.g. when Ballmer was influential at MS (CEO?), he used
to rant on about "developers developers developers" (amongst other
things):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY (Ballmer in 2008; plenty
more where that came from).

That "look after the developers, and the rest will follow" attitude
helped MS get where they got. But times change, and needs vary. In
particular, fashions (and CEOs) come and go. MS's repeated changes
of software strategy haven't won them many friends. To Ballmer,
Linux was a cancer. To Ballmer's replacement (Nadella), Linux is a
place where people can run MS SQL Server and such like.

Not everyone's needs can be satisified by a single high volume low
margin (but shiny, and popular with developers) OS platform with
lots of  shiny widgets available. Obviously lots of people are OK
with the high volume low margin model, especially if it allows
more than one option, or it wouldn't be a high volume OS.

That's fine, use the tool where it fits the requirements - but
developers are not the only people with requirements.

Meanwhile, good engineering is still good engineering. Building on
sand is still, in cases where it matters, a bad idea.