“sure you can come be a carpenter, here’s your spoon” @mousepotato
Kubernetes and cloud-native are about driving efficiencies in an organization, particularly for “developer productivity” (which includes SREs these days). But those efficiencies are entirely lost if your organization demands that your IT team only use Windows with Putty.
Companies approve millions for Kubernetes and yet don’t even have an official Linux laptop workstation image for their employees. If you don’t see the irony in that, well, you have bigger problems. Cloud-native transformation starts by getting your IT team the tools they need before rebuilding your IT tech stack to include “cloud native” and “DevOps”.
Windows with Putty connecting to servers to do all your development is a server-dependent paradigm that died more than 15 years ago. How the hell is your team supposed to work without an Internet connection? (This is also the main problem with all the web-based pair programming and developer tools.) You have defeated the entire point of Git by forcing a remote login to do any development. This is the polar opposite of DevOps, which fundamentally depends on Git.
Please tell me you see how stupid this is. If not, well… just don’t utter words like this:
“I just don’t see why you need Linux? Everyone else is doing just fine without it. We need to figure out what you are doing differently and decide as a team what to do. Did you get that Helm chart finished?”
It’s 2021 for God’s sake.
Stop and think, why has Microsoft invested so heavily in WSL2 and Linux? Since 2014 MS has been diligently focused on integrating Linux at the OS level. The “developers, developers, developers” company that once called Linux “viral” and never to be trusted saw the writing on the wall, fired those people, and get busy getting developers their Linux they demand.
Developers use Linux. But not just them. The entire IT world is based on
Linux these days. Containers could not exist without cgroups that
Linux brought to popularity. It follows then that any company’s top IT priority is
getting your people 100% trained and using Linux as their daily driver.
Punishing these developers for even asking the question, or making them
feel small for questioning the official Putty on Windows position is a sure
guarantee to get them to walk out the door, and in the current drought
for skills cloud-native, Linux professionals that could literally kill
your company.
I’ve caught myself saying those words three times now on my new team. It comes off as a joke, but I’m very serious. If your company and team is so completely unable to realize how fucking stupid using Putty on an official HPC Kubernetes team is then I simply want no part of it. If I’m the only one on the team who actively uses TMUX and screen then I already have an uphill battle. But, I can get equal or better pay from someplace else.
Even Microsoft has official tools for this now (WSL2 still has annoyances.) At least distribute IT images with WSL2 properly installed and configured to begin with (even though, as my friend suggests, “you just gave the carpenter a knife instead of a spoon” with which a lot of junior carpenters might kill themselves or someone else). Or better yet, create a solid Linux workstation image like so many do already and only give it to people you know can use Linux.
If you are a manager, you probably have cowboys in your team already that you don’t even know about that appear to be doing the same tasks as the rest of the team without any regard for IT policies at all. This is just cheating. They’ve already installed their own Linux distribution and fooled everyone because they haven’t been caught, or worse, they’ve turned that little Windows laptop into a full SOCKS proxy router and do all their work on their personal machines using the laptop as their own personal VPN gateway into your network. Such cowboys should be fired immediately. They place the entire organization at risk because their hubris doesn’t allow them to see the danger they’ve exposed the company to. Of course, they never see it that way because their arrogance has convinced them that they are invincible. They’re not.
If you are the cowboy, you are hurting everyone else on the team because you are creating a false perception that “everyone else is doing this just fine” when they really are not. So all the new people look like idiots compared to you because they just want to following the IT policy rules and are forced to use Putty on Windows, for example. Besides, you might not be afraid of being fired. You might thing that you can get a job anywhere. But if you get fired for “cause” because you opening violated basic security policies that shit will follow you. Stop now. Have the courage to stick up for everyone who is suffering. If you are really that good, then walk out into another job that will allow you to do such things and trust your skills. At least everyone else won’t pay the price while you are there.
When I was at IBM I came onto a team who had all their critical source code in tar balls, that was it. 1000s of lines of code in nothing but tar ball backups. No source management to be seen anywhere. I had to setup Subversion on my own as an “experiment” (approved, btw) and eventually everyone adopted it. But had I put that to a vote it would have failed instantly.
“We don’t really need that, do we. We’ve been just fine”
IT conservatism is one of the biggest demotivators anyone can
experience. It’s hard to balance this versus what is trending, but
things like git are not trends at this point. People asking to
install NeoVim (alpha software shit) on production systems should be
laughed out of the room.
People are plenty happy to connect to systems with only
Vim 7.+ installed, no screen or tmux, and back level versions of
just about everything else, oh and no docker installation at all to
speak of. Usually such teams might not even know what git is or how to
use it responsibly to store everything in source management. But when
they say, “just use this and such” and your .vimrc breaks because you
are expecting to at least have version 8+ you have to start responding,
“what the fuck are you talking about” (while you prepare your CV for a
job change).
In fact, in some places to run Docker Desktop on your computer you have to get special permission to have admin rights and manage the installation yourself, even when DD decides to ship with a fatal error, but who knows, it could have been the forced Windows upgrade that happened at the same time, which happened during some critical PD work, by the way.
I happen to think there is a new dawn and it’s called “zero trust”. It is a new IT paradigm that doesn’t trust any device whatsoever that is connected to the network. Let’s face it, anyone truly motivated can easily get on your corporate VPN, particularly if you have 20,000 employees all over the globe. Creating an IT atmosphere where you expect every single system to levels of security that could withstand direct attack from the Internet is not overkill. It’s the new normal.
This is why so many cloud service providers are getting so popular now and services like GitHub Enterprise, Slack, MS Teams, and other cloud-based solutions are becoming normal. The more IT departments take the zero trust position, the more they can expose entire segments of what would be an internal intranet to the actual Internet.
BYOD then becomes possible because you automatically assume that any device in your entire infrastructure has been compromised. This includes all your IT team’s personal laptops and phones. So you create expectations on them.
There are organizations that will never go for this, that demand air gaps even between their network and the outside world. Even if one USB stick would blow it all away (remember Stuxnet). But at least adding a level of trust to the IT team would allow them to get work done using the tools they know and love..
All this ranting makes me feel better, but it isn’t the kind of thing you can say directly to the decision makers. They’ll just get offended, or puff up because their ego and pride have been bruised — especially if you are a noob like me who still has a lot of Kubernetes to learn. But I feel fine knowing that my knowledge of just about everything else in the “developer productivity” area destroys theirs even though the might be able to talk the Kubernetes stuff. I’ve never felt more motivated to help people get a solid base in the tools they will use every day before launching off into cloud native land.
I also really like being around these human beings. They are phenomenal people, but at the end of the day, I’m having to decide if I want to continue to remain with them and suffer by being forced to use Windows every day, and eventually dying from a heart attack from all the cortisol it pushes into my system, or just walk away and find another group of amazing people that will actually let me run Linux on my workstation, every fucking day.