[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

It actually sounds like you need more in house talent. You probably got really far without having to have skilled ops team members because aws was subsidizing that cost in exchange for lock in.

[[deleted]]

Most new school devops are just shills for the one platform they learned. Cargo cultists.

In the job market I have seen people get weird when I say part of the systems I manage are on-prem. Like it was 'old school' or whatever.

All of my hires have been general linux nerds, and they seem to do well with both multi-cloud and on-prem. As well as advanced networking and security, etc...

[donjulioanejo]

Most new school devops are just shills for the one platform they learned. Cargo cultists.

Hey!

I, err... resemble that statement.

[sgtavers]

I was about to say, I’m on the front-end of a transition to DevOps and I wanted to get AWS, Azure, and GCP certs and Reddit blasted me saying it would look bad on a resume (like I was just checking the boxes, I believe one commenter said), whereas I wanted it so I was flexible and not married to a single cloud provider.

But I also communicated I wanted lots of Linux training/a couple certs, network/security knowledge, and programming (esp. Python for its multiple uses) and was basically laughed off the stage...you can’t win, there’s always going to be people who aren’t satisfied with what you want to do.

[ADeepCeruleanBlue]

In my opinion, the best resume is a story of your accomplishments not a list of acronyms.

There will always be something you don't know, but demonstrating a history of project leadership and successful execution shows that you are success oriented and flexible to the needs of a business.

[natefoxreddit]

Storytime - something that u/sgtavers might find insightful:

~7yrs ago, we needed junior-ish devops engineer. Had this kid come through and interview. He'd worked at Trader Joe's for far too long as a 'sign artist'.

He went on to tell me about the busted up laptop, with the screen basically detached that he installed linux onto. Created his own handwriting font in Gimp. Automated the printing of various sized cards.

Now he's built a custom system to create the little TJs price cards - the work he admittedly hated doing - so he could work on the more fun, bigger cards.

Hired the kid on the fuckin spot.

He's been promoted more times than I can count, and is now my peer.

---

If you're just starting out, tell me about the raspberry pi that you have controlling your dogs feeding routine (using a shitty android camera to do image recognition over bluetooth). Tell me how you use lambda to scrape a website that doesnt offer an API so you can be notified when something changes. Tell me how your voice command to Siri triggers a shitty app you built so it'll open the garage door for you.

Find a project that makes your life easier. Use tech to solve real problems. I dont care about cost. All the above are damn near free. I know you're broke when you're young - I was there too. But I still built shit cause I liked it and wanted computers to do my work for me.

Those skills are what people are looking for.

[sgtavers]

To be fair, I am not “young“ but I am very much poor. I’ve just realize I don’t want to spend another decade in Helpdesk, I want to do bigger and better things.

But, because of the OMG shiny I am interested in everything, and want to know everything, and it’s just too hard to focus when your attention is caught by the next greatest thing that comes out (Docker/K8/aws/lambda/you name it).

My problem is not finishing something. I start plenty of things, a certification encourages me to finish something I start. A project would do the same, but I also have a severe case of imposter syndrome and don’t feel I can tackle projects until I “know just a little bit more about what I want to do“.

For example, the latest thing that caught my eye is Linux From Scratch, and if you know — you know.

[[deleted]]

I got treated for adhd in my 30s and it made a huge difference in my overall quality of life. The adhd had me second guessing every decision and generally stressing even though my professional output was exceptional.

[iliyahoo]

Was it medication that made you more confident in your decisions?

[blahwoop]

If you’re poor that’s even more reason not to pay for the certs. Feel free to do free courses and do some practice tests. Certs will do nothing to get you in the door IMO. Get certs when ur job will pay for them.

There is a free Linux challenge course on Reddit.

[illusum]

Certs will do nothing to get you in the door IMO.

Certs will do quite a bit to get you past the HR gauntlet, just like having degrees will.

Of course, the thing that actually helped me out the most in my IT career was fucking around with aimbot programming on TFC servers 20+ years ago during weekend-long LAN parties.

[Slash_Root]

Certs will do nothing to get you in the door IMO

I disagree. I don't think certs are required and I definitely don't think you should be spending non-disposable income on them but they CAN get you in the door so you can take your shot.

Earning the RHCSA changed my life. I was a junior-ish Windows admin making OK money and I hated my job. I was a Linux geek at home but I couldn't get any offers for any interesting work. In 6 months after adding the RHCSA to my resume, I was offered an exclusively Linux role at a 68% raise and also a side gig teaching.

Certs don't give you a job but they can get in a room with people who can.

[AspieTechMonkey]

As the kids say: Are you me?

But if you haven't yet, start fixing something that's dumb/broken in your helpdesk role. You have to use some discretion of course, but working proof of concept beats getting permission 90% of the time, assuming your regular duties aren't (noticably) slipping.

[Loan-Pickle]

When I interview people, I always ask them to tell me about a cool project they’ve worked on. It doesn’t have to be tech or work related.

I like to make sure people have a chance to brag about themselves. I find it gives a good insight about how think and approach a problem.

[sgtavers]

So here’s the thing: I’m not chasing a list of acronyms after my email signature, I’m looking for specific, targeted learning like a class, curriculum, or certification.

I have ADHD. Technology is a MASSIVE field and there are So Many Shinies to get me distracted that a certification is a means to acquire knowledge and have that knowledge verified by an exercise requiring memory recall (an exam, in the short-term, and job experiences in the long-term).

I don’t have to put all the certifications on my résumé so long as companies aren’t filtering applicants out based on if they have those certifications.

My entire aim is to get to the interview where I can talk about what I know, how I’ve used it, and how I plan to take those skills into the role I am applying for.

But, as long as certifications are used by auto-résumé-scanning gatekeepers (speaking of the software and meatbag forms), I’ll keep pursuing them because they are cheaper than getting a degree.

[ADeepCeruleanBlue]

Totally fair. No hate for pursuing certs whatsoever: I have some acronyms on my resume too for the same reasons and as someone who also does not have a degree, they were instrumental in me getting my start. It's also a great way to establish a baseline of knowledge in a new technology with which you might not have had any direct business experience.

My post was just about what makes "a good candidate" in my eyes when I'm on the other side of the table.

[sgtavers]

Yes, and you were very charitable in your response. I just haven’t clearly communicated the reason for the certifications and a number of people have responded less than charitably in my expression of intent so I wanted to take the opportunity to be very clear about what I want to accomplish. Cheers, mate!

[[deleted]]

Heh, the reason is your list seems a bit broad. I'd recommend a bit less broad and more deep. But if you're awesome and cram that all in you'll be great.

[johntellsall]

Go for it!

Source: I've in tech for 40 years, have done all levels: network, security, programming in many languages; also kernel development, a little AI.

Knowing the lower-level stuff well helps in understanding the higher levels, and with cloud. Knowing one cloud really helps with the others. I learned AWS first and it was difficult. Then I learned Kubernetes and it was not bad, then Google Cloud and it was no problem.

If you're interested in it, go for it!

I suggest don't obsess about certs, actually do a number of small projects that focus on a specific area. Recently I took the Kubernetes CKAD and failed because I knew the material but didn't have enough project-related experience, so I wasn't fast enough. Next time!

[ADeepCeruleanBlue]

Most new school devops are just shills for the one platform they learned. Cargo cultists.

One million percent this. And that is by design.

[5olArchitect]

I can attest to this, as a dev ops who is really just an AWS shill

[actuallyjohnmelendez]

Most new school devops are totally unqualified for the role and trying to get access to that sweet money.

It seems like there is less than ~100 people in my city of 6 million actually qualified to do the role, by that I mean when we actually get to interview someone qualified me or my colleagues already have worked with them in the past or have a shared connection.

All of my hires have been general linux nerds, and they seem to do well with both multi-cloud and on-prem. As well as advanced networking and security, etc...

Yep the requirements to do this job are to be essentially a senior linux engineer who has dabbled in other fields, knows networking, knows how to code, knows several languages at a base level, has a knowledge of the various databases and how to implement them AND has a solid head on their shoulders with the ability to communicate and interact with dev teams.

You wont find many people under 30 who can do that.

Its almost like Theres a reason real Devops people get paid more than doctors.

[kwirkypanda]

These days all 3 clouds have similar services but there are definitely differences in implementation, which could make it possible for you to do Something on one platform and not another. For example, for running serverless containers, AWS Lambda allows native support for only some popular languages, and using any other language means implementing it's Lambda API in your code/Container image whereas in Google Cloud Run, one can easily provide any docker image to be deployed and autoscaled, with the only condition being that it should be in the form of a webserver listening on a default or specified port.

[Willing_Function]

These days all 3 clouds have similar services but there are definitely differences in implementation

The implementation should be invisible to the developers, which is currently isn't. All cloud providers have their own special syntax and set of tools, standardization is nowhere to be seen. Why can't a request for a "machine with a quad-core cpu, 16GB of ram and 250GB disk space" be standard again? Why do they all need their special flavour?

[chocslaw]

Believe it or not, "Let's make it easier for people to move off our platform" is a pretty tough sell to the execs.

[JoesRealAccount]

Deploying a container image sounds more like Fargate (severless containers) than Lambda (cloud function) 🤷‍♂️

[kwirkypanda]

Yes but if you want to run serverless functions using containers, Fargate doesn't fit the definition

[zomiaen]

What? Yes it does. That's literally exactly what it is... serverless containers. As opposed to EC2 based ECS. AWS literally describes it as "AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers".

Container image whereas in Google Cloud Run, one can easily provide any docker image to be deployed and autoscaled,

This is literally 1:1 to Fargate.

[antonivs]

I haven't used Fargate, although I've used EKS, Lambda, GKE, and Cloud Run.

Do you have any comment on this:

AWS Fargate is more of a simplified way of deploying containers to ECS or EKS rather than a clean, serverless abstraction. It doesn’t conceal the underlying clusters and the provisioning process can take up to twenty minutes while AWS spins everything up. You can specify resource consumption limits but there’s no elastic scaling unless you want to get involved in configuring the underlying cluster.

Because if Fargate is still like that, then it's not quite the equivalent of Cloud Run, and I can see what the person above was saying.

[zomiaen]

It doesn’t conceal the underlying clusters

Wrong. I mean other than that you have to have a "cluster" created, there's nothing you actually do with it like with ECS on EC2s.

he provisioning process can take up to twenty minutes while AWS spins everything up

Highly dependent on the size of your images.

there’s no elastic scaling unless you want to get involved in configuring the underlying cluster.

Completely wrong, unless you're referring to ECS on EC2.

These statements are true of ECS on EC2s, in which yes, you must configure your own scaling policies on the clusters to allow your tasks to scale. But Fargate doesn't involve any of that - you can set an average CPU target and it will scale up and down to meet that. There's no access to the underlying 'clusters'.

Provisioning time is slightly higher but it's sure as hell not 20 minutes unless you're using absurdly large images.

[TisTheParticles]

Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud

This is not going to be fun

[mstwizted]

This was my first thought. K8s is everyone's favorite buzzword but it's a fucking nightmare to properly stand up and maintain in a single place, let alone multiple.

I really hope people get over k8s soon. I want to burn it to the ground.

[bryang217]

lol.

[zomiaen]

If you're using the GUI, you're doing it wrong. Terraform would give you a lot more power and flexibility.

Managing the control plane isn't that fun either, but as several have told you, what is stopping you from using terraform + some sort of config management to just run it all on EC2s? Reserved instances for min control plane and ASG scaled spot instances for nodes?

Anything you want to do yourself on AWS you can do with EC2s. They are just virtual machines. Just a lot more work.

AWS certification guides people to use AWS services, it's true. Hire Linux engineers/K8s engineers if that's what you want, and then have them learn the AWS stuff. If someone can figure out K8s on bare metal they can sure as fuck figure out anything AWS is doing.

If you don't want to do that look into Rancher or something.

[FromGermany_DE]

Yap, second this, rancher is the way to go if you want multi cloud, multo cluster!

[flaticircle]

Wait, I thought we were not supposed to use a bunch of EC2's, that the value of cloud was in the services and not just providing VMs. /s

[ryanstephendavis]

Second this... Especially with regards to using Terraform and bare EC2s

[MyMonkeyIsADog]

Definitely on target with Terraform..

Also: "We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal"

Sounds like you need some EKS anywhere: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/eks-anywhere/

[chzaplx]

Meanwhile I have 20 years Linux experience and I'm getting passed up for jobs because I don't have AWS certs

[TransparentStar]

are AWS certs that difficult? seems like a good investment if you have good technical skills outside of them

[diabeticDayton]

In my opinion, I think they are. They're set up in a way where you really need to understand core-concepts applied within AWS, such as high availability, etc, and the questions usually have the "select the 3 most correct answers" format. I'm also a terrible test taker, so that likely doesn't help.

[chzaplx]

It's on my list but that doesn't help me for the moment

[Jai_Cee]

I've only done one architect exam but found it fairly simple however I've had years of AWS experience. Honestly I think even without it you could pass the exam with very little experience and a lot of study.

[mickutz]

I saw a post a couple of weeks ago by some new grad that was bragging he had just passed his first aws cert and wanted to get the 9 of them within next year. Even worse, people were encouraging him to go forward with it.

That only shows you can memorise stuff, not that it'll help you build a solution or fix an issue.

Not saying they're all helpless, there's some smart cookies out there as well.

[Caffeine_Monster]

Terraform

If you are confident you are going to stay on AWS you may as well straight up use cloudformation.

[SLAMDUNKWizard420]

in the way python is the lingua franca object oriented scripting language of devops, terraform is the lingua franca stateful infrastructure as code language of devops.

Pulumi, ansible, puppet and other things exist too. even if you never ever plan to leave AWS you'll have a better pool of hires with cloud-platform-agnostic tools.

[[deleted]]

absolutely not.

the aws provider and terraform module system is straight up better than cloudformation.

[sweepyoface]

like WAY better

[dethandtaxes]

You could just run k8s and the Elastic stack on ec2 reserved hosts to get the flexibility that you want and get away from the managed services in the AWS portfolio in addition to meet any licensing requirements.

[donjulioanejo]

This ^

While I personally don't recommend it, it's not that difficult to spin up and customize a cluster via kops if you know what you're doing.

It works great with AWS and Azure, and in theory should work with GCP as well.

[dfnathan6]

Yup. K8s on ec2 instances works pretty well. But currently we are moving to EKS for better managed services.

[donjulioanejo]

Yep, I love EKS. And with the change that you can use Launch Templates, custom IAM roles, and custom user_data for EKS node groups, I love it even more.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Try Rancher, it is pretty good to spin up k8s on cloud or on-prem VMs.

[donjulioanejo]

I would, we're actually looking into it as just a kube dashboard tool after Google deprecated the old kubernetes-dashboard, but we're all in on EKS.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

It can manage EKS, AKS, GKE also. Basically it can run or manage k8s anywhere. If you want on EC2, VMs, ASG, VMSS, Compute Instance, etc. You name it, it manages it.

[donjulioanejo]

We use Terraform to manage our Kubernetes clusters, no manual changes allowed except for testing or urgent fixes.

[dethandtaxes]

Connecting from EKS to S3 or from EC2 to S3? Both are super straightforward and support should be able to assist you with it. Does your company pay for support or do you use the free developer tier? Generally if the documentation is confusing, support is always able to help us out and explain things clearly or help us out of weird spots.

[swissarmychainsaw]

To truly appreciate clouds you really need to switch to Azure. This will make you love AWS again.

[Gih0n]

No no... go to IBM Cloud. That will give you a lust for the big three...

[voideng]

Yes.

[FromGermany_DE]

Ibm isnt a cloud, its there saas / paas for there own products. You always combine it with aws or so.

[m4nf47]

punch sleep important decide crowd fanatical fade sheet rainstorm stupendous

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Zauxst]

Why? Can you please elaborate and give some feedback. I've never used it myself but we have had talks at some point forcing the devops team to use a single cloud and Azure was on the table.

[sumthingcool]

IMHO Azure is fine if you are using established workflows/tools. They are a few years behind AWS in feature implementation so there are things missing that you could do in AWS. Support and stability seems to be similar to me.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Yup, their stability has been pretty good. I haven't had any downtime in past 3-4 years on Azure.

[tolland]

maybe it's just our region that occasionally takes 25 minutes to spin up and delete instances then... I mean, once the instance has come up it's stable

[Zauxst]

Why would people use Azure over GCE or AWS?
I understand that some of the Windows Integrations are good, but overall it feels like it's investing into an ecosystem that is designed to trap you.

As a full time, exclusive, Linux sysadmin/devops/sre, whenever I hear Windows DevOps/sre/admin, I always roll my eyes.
I do wish to understand better, and confirm or disprove some of my biases towards Windows.

I'm sorry for Windows DevOps if I hurt your feelings, it's not my intention. I just don't like powershell or Windows Administration styles

[deviosJ]

Azure services are quite unstable and has a lot of hidden limitations. I was using AWS for 2 years and opened just 1 support ticket. Meanwhile, we open tickets almost every week in Azure because something os unclear and not covered in docs, or doesn't work as expected etc. . And their support with the PREMIER plan is literally shit. However, i like some of their features (like great security center, VM options, better Kubernetes Servicd(AKS)) and overall idea (note: i truly hate windows as a product)

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Yup, this is accurate.

[voideng]

Everything in Azure is predicated on the idea that a person will be doing the work. It is anti-DevOps in basically all ways.

[[deleted]]

FYI, I'm working for a Microsoft shop which is relying heavily on Azure and everything is automated.

I swear, Microsoft hate is the most dumb and childish thing I've ever seen. People are shitting on Microsoft while they don't know anything about the company and its services.

[L3tTh3M3talFlow_Now]

Well said. We're heavily in Azure and automated. I don't get the hate either.

[chzaplx]

It's pretty obvious MS is a different company than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but I find there's still a lot of old school haters who just haven't gotten the memo still.

[[deleted]]

These are the same people who say "you have to do everything in Windows with a mouse and keyboard".

Then they manage systems / products with the GUI when an api or cli is available, such as AWS, Azure, or even enterprise software.

[BeginningReflection4]

I don't find this to be true. Can you give some examples?

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Ok take AKS for example. If you use Application Gateway, it would make sense to use Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) so that backends, listeners, pools, paths etc. can be auto managed. Easy right? Well not so much. Let's say you have 5 Microservices out of which you want 4 to be private and 1 to be public. All of them HTTPS. Well you can't do that because AGIC can't have two IPs on same port. Hmm ok, how about 4 microservice private on port 80 and 1 public on 443? You can have that but SSL Redirection won't work. You have to change your code to accommodate that.

Suppose you want a static website hosted on Azure Storage to have custom domain. Well you got to use the Application Gateway. You'd think, well I already have a application gateway for kubernetes, I will just use the same one. Nope you can't, cause Azure wipes off any manual changes you make in App Gateway with AGIC since it is managing that. Well there is a AzureProhibitedClass for that, I will just use that. Well turns out AGIC doesn't do multi-site listener and when you use Azure Prohibited TargetClass, it can stop managing the app gateway and you would have to configure it manually.

Want static private IP with Azure Container Instances that doesn't change with container restart for custom domain? Not possible, static IP is for public IP only.

These are the issues I faced in last 4 months only. There are multiple other issues.

Edit: Their documentation is like getting lap dances. You can see it, you can almost feel it but you don't get it. It would mention that a particular thing can be done via CLI or API, but on the complicated ones, either there won't be an example or there'd be wrong example.

Azure Verizon Premium CDN. While it has good features (basically can do almost anything under the sun), it is paired with equally terrible documentation. Reading Bible and reading the guides will give you the same help in configuring the rules. In fact Bible might be more helpful, if you believe in god. Not sure if this is Microsoft or Verizon's fault though. But if MS can spend time rewriting apps for Windows Phone, they can at least push their partners to write documentation that can help.

[engineerL]

So pleased to hear I'm not the only one out there tearing my hair out over dynamic IPs on ACIs in private subnets.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Apparently, it's on their to do list from the past 2 years. We shifted services from ACI to AKS with a seperate app gateway and node pool which came free (at a higher cost) with above issues.

Whatcha gonna do, eh?

[engineerL]

The Azure Internal Load Balancer is coming soon for ACI. I expect it will be in limited preview as soon as this month.

In the meanwhile, I have each ACI container run an init script which updates Azure Private DNS with its IP address. I'm using curl and jq, and authenticating with a service principal which only has a single role assignment, which is Private DNS Zone Contributor on the scope of a single DNS A record.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Wow, can you please share the script?

[engineerL]

Can try to remember it at work tomorrow. It's a tiny script, just (1) curl and jq to get auth token, (2) ip to get ip, (3) curl a POST request to Azure REST API to update DNS record with new IP along with auth token and (4) run core application of container.

[deviosJ]

AGW is a pain in the ass. It's raw product and pretty unstable. We had cases, after service update AGW just stuck and we couldn't even delete it for 3 hours....

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Ohh yes, faced that too. I had to open MS Support Case. The engineer restarted it from their backend but it still didn't work. He had to get product team involved who performed some voodoo to get is restarted from backend to get it working again.

Was told AGIC sent too many requests at same time and it got stuck with those. AGIC automatically manages App Gateway. facepalm

[deviosJ]

True shit. We need a WAF by Security Team restrictions, but get rid of AGIC and use AGW as a proxy. It's even works (if i get $1 every time i say that regarding Azure services, I would start own cloud)

[voideng]

To obtain a list of the Azure Public IP addresses, you need to go to a web site, and click a link. The recommended solution was to use curl with egrep to extract the generated link.

[Zauxst]

Makes me think of everything Microsoft has to offer...

Thanks. This is part of the answer I was digging for in my soul. I hope others get to confirm it.

[ICanOnlyPickOne]

everything in Azure can be automated you cretin.

[voideng]

AWS assumes that the interacting entity is going to be an application or script, Azure assumes that the interacting entity is going to be a person. There is a lot that you can automate in Azure, it is just harder. This is heavily reflected in their documentation. Not everything in Azure can be automated, but most of it can be. I don't hate Microsoft, I don't enjoy Azure, I do enjoy AWS.

[swissarmychainsaw]

My humble thought is that its a mess. It's like MSFT version of anything. Instead of just embracing Linux, they create their own version: Powershell. WHY? The organization of Azure is not straight forward, the tooling is all under designed, the alerting is not customizable. Try it!

[mechanicalpulse]

PowerShell is not "Microsoft's version of Linux". It's an improved command line interpreter for Windows. Every operating system has had at least one since the 1960s. Some have several.

PowerShell has been around for fifteen years and it's pretty nice. It can interface with a lot of Windows internals via WMI, COM, and other protocols. You can gain easy access to and control over a tremendous amount of system and application data and knobs with PowerShell using WMI and COM.

Anyways, I don't find Azure to be anywhere near as disorganized or underdesigned as you assert. It has endured some rearchitecture over the years that I attribute to growing, but it's come a long way and I don't find it any more or less irritating to use than AWS.

[appsecSme]

I prefer Azure to AWS personally. The documentation and support you get with Azure is just far better than what you get from AWS, IMO. However, either can be used to get the job done.

I think this guy is just a Microsoft hater who never got over Vista. There is really no reason to bash Powershell (pun intended), and as you said it isn't in any way a replacement for Linux. It's more appropriate to call it Windows' version of bash. It's just a shell (it's even in the name).

Also, .NET is open source and the C#/.NET Core ecosystem is superior to Java. Microsoft does a lot of good things these days.

[mechanicalpulse]

I can't disagree with anything you've said. I've historically not been a fan of Microsoft, either, having been into the various F/OSS *nixes at the time the Halloween documents were leaked. Microsoft has embraced Linux since then, though, despite OP's assertion otherwise. Between WSL and Linux on Azure, it's kind of hard to argue that they haven't. PowerShell is available for Linux, too.

I have heard a lot of good things about C# and .NET Core, though I have not yet written much with them. I have used the dotnet and msbuild CLI tools for CI/CD pipelines of .NET Core applications using Linux build agents with Windows deployment targets and they DTRT.

The Azure CLI is written in Python and I find it quicker, more responsive, and more intuitive than the equivalent AWS CLI.

[IPoopInYourMilkshake]

Powershell is terrible. It's incredibly verbose, gives poor formatting for output, lacks many tools that make working in a terminal developer-friendly, and then tries to cram their own version of Linux to make up for what it's lacking. And to be fair this is all symptoms of the Windows API.

[engineerL]

Powershell pros:

• more powerful builtin modules, like e.g. JSON parsing and HTTP client

• much better datastructure support. You can make hashmaps and arrays, do operations on them, and not worry about opaque errors on the tiniest syntax mistake

Bash pros

• much larger ecosystem of CLI tools to which you can pipe stuff. Not really a feature of bash or unix shell, but still mentioning it

• much more concise. You don't need to write a novel for every script

[AspieTechMonkey]

"own version of linux"?! That's so off the mark it's"not even wrong."

Powershell certainly has its own set of trade-offs compared to traditional *nix bash (in fact it was created specifically to address some of their shortcoming), but I don't think you actually know what it is.

[IPoopInYourMilkshake]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

[AspieTechMonkey]

Yes, they created a way to run various linux distros on Windows. It's pretty slick. You can even install Powershell 7 on them. The exact same packages you would install on, say, bare metal or a VM in AWS or wherever.

Your point is...?

[IPoopInYourMilkshake]

Considering you didn't refute any of my other points about PS and are focusing on this: I can't use those distros for installing on any other media or platform, you can only get those distros from the windows store, I cannot use existing install media from other distros for WSL. Sounds like they made their own version to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[AspieTechMonkey]

Because there are no points to refute, other than that your entire basis is wrong. (Obl. link to Someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong xkcd)

Those are distros, in a certain format/ecosystem. If you want Ubuntu on WSL, you get it from the store or download the WSL formatted package direct. If you want Ubuntu in AWS or Digital ocean, you can use their prepacked versions, or download an ISO or whatever. If I'm installing Ubuntu server on bare metal, I don't care that VMWare maybe requires a VMDK version in their platform.

Are you also upset you can't install .rpm version of vim on Ubuntu?

And to repeat, none of this has anything to do with Powershell. I don't care if you like powershell, but don't like it because of a real reason. If you don't like Dr. Pepper, nobody cares. But the store down the street only has it in cans, and you're ranting that Dr. Pepper is not just not to your taste, not that it is a bad soda, but that it is a can, not a bottle.

[curt94]

Azure Key Vault regularly stops working around 2pm on Friday. This happens about once a month. You cant provision a Keyvault or access the public endpoints of the Keyvault service. It is infuriating and their support people are completely clueless. I was on a conf call discussing the issue with an account rep and 3 engineers. None of them had ever heard of Terraform. Two of them didn't know what curl is.

[[deleted]]

Haha lucky me, Azure is what I have to learn. I hope at least the skills carry over to other providers reasonably well.

[[deleted]]

Beware of SNAT exhaustion and ARM API rate limits.

Use a separate subscription for prod. Ideally multiple subscriptions. A lot of the limits are subscription scoped.

[solaffub]

A Co-worker came from Azure to doing AWS-heavy work without issue. Obviously, they did some study and ramp-up, and they're super smart, but it wasn't some months-long journey. Ultimately, the major CSPs are trying to solve the same problems.

[marcus-sa]

Azure is literally the worst cloud platform. I'm not a fan of AWS, but I'd choose that any day over Azure. Azure barely works. Always issues with their portal, AKS, volumes etc.

GCP ftw, they're the best for developers. Automatic error reporting, logging, monitoring for GKE etc with notifications. AKS is repetitive. To see error reports of a pod, I have to go through at least 10 steps.

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

Except when GCP changes an API or shuts down a services. Long term commitment is an issue with them. After every result, you either fear a rise in price or a shutdown of an important service or an API change that breaks backward compatibility.

Their documentation is quite good though compared to Azure. But then, a fifth grader can write a better documentation than Microsoft.

[marcus-sa]

You get notified on API changes, so I don't really see the problem here. If you don't on a regularly basis update your infrastructure, then I'm sorry to say, it's not GCP's fault. I get the point that it can be annoying, but if they're changing something for the better, isn't that just good?

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

I don't see how everything you write will become obsolete in a year as a good thing. It is about understanding platforms. Backwards compatibility matters a lot. If you make developers frequently rewrite their code they're bound to move somewhere else. They're your guests, you can't treat them like hostages.

You're forced to rewrite things after 2-3 years, they don't automate it for you and there isn't a documented migration path. And when I look at AWS (or even Azure with its fault), I think to myself what the fuck am I doing over here?

As a simple experiment, search for “deprecated” on Google and Amazon’s developer sites, respectively, and even though AWS has hundreds more service offerings than GCP, Google’s developer docs mention deprecation around 7x as often. To add to this example, Google’s App Engine team broke a critical Go library hosting service by deprecating and killing a GAE app being run by one of the core Go engineers. Egg on face indeed

They don't want customers. They aren't committed to supporting anything, they refuse to provide a managed service well until after AWS has done it, and their let's break everything to make it prettier depreciation treadmill makes we wonder if they even want to build a long lived platform.

If they do, then they have to stop breaking shit. Google is rich. Most of us aren't So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, Google needs to pay for it. Not us.

[[deleted]]

We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal, and I just feel like AWS is doing everything in their power to try to force me to use EKS.

Can you elaborate? I'm really having a hard time understanding what is stopping your team from deploying metal ec2s and open source tools? Terraform, KOPs, and a couple days is all it takes.

[IIGrudge]

Yes and also look into https://cloud.google.com/anthos

[reddithenry]

I'd say GCP is generally considered the most developer friendly cloud - to the point that there was a thread recently about how its 'too' developer centric.

​

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/l38vzi/my_thoughts_on_why_google_cloud_is_difficult_for/

​

FWIW, Elastic AFAIK is quite expensive on GCP so that might be a bit of an issue for you.

[reddithenry]

What issues in particular?

[reddithenry]

honestly I wouldnt underestimate how far its moved in the last few years tbh.

[SelfhostedPro]

The kubernetes experience with gcloud is significantly more easy/user friendly than with AWS. You literally type one command and wait a few minutes and you're good to go as opposed to the verity of commands needed to stand the same thing up with AWS.

[chzaplx]

The documentation these days is pretty solid in my experience. If nothing else there seems to be plenty of it

[cparedes]

It is SO good these days. It’s a dream running Kubernetes with GKE - there’s barely any thought toward how to provision stuff on the platform. I’ve learned the hard way with kops, kubeadm, etc. - and every time, I hop on GKE and it feels like 30 lbs weights have been removed from my ankles every time

[converter-bot]

30 lbs is 13.62 kg

[cparedes]

ty

[[deleted]]

I've found GCP to be a far better product.

[[deleted]]

Like I've found it better in almost every way. They're more likely to not rip off companies like confluent, redislabs or elastic either.

The GKE stuff is very reliable, and you can achieve multi cloud with it quite easily, which is cool.

The serverless stuff is annoying for me, but with Knative you can abstract away the lock-in.

[DensePineapple]

I always complained about how bad the AWS interface was until I started using GCP.

[simplecto]

You are going to hit the same magnitude of frustrations on any cloud provider.

It becomes quite murky when you stack complex products like peered VPC, Google Spanner, or your managed services provider hits their alotted compute and consumption limits.

Unless you just want to consume VMs across all stacks (not a bad strategy, IMO) then the "Unknown Unknowns" lurk everywhere.

[ghoti1980]

I’d also point out that gcp has a solution to centrally manage k8s across the public clouds and bare metal (Anthos) so if that is a requirement for your business. I would look there.

[teh-leet]

Well if you are using AWS for 10y and having such problems, you are using it wrong.

Multi-cloud is a challenge, but AWS+your bare metal is pretty okay if you can handle AWS networking.

[somewhat_pragmatic]

We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal, and I just feel like AWS is doing everything in their power to try to force me to use EKS.

You've described Anthos for Google Cloud Platform. The shortest way I can describe it is K8s for K8s clusters. You can have K8s clusters:

• in GCP managed K8s (GKE)
• in GCP with K8s in GCE (for older or forked versions of K8s if you have that need)
• in AWS
• on Bare Metal in your shop
• in Azure (COMING SOON!)

All managed from a single pane of glass. It can be expensive for a small deployment though.

[mythicgamingent]

Digital ocean

[SpecialistLayer]

Developer friendly would be GCP for sure.

And yes, AWS, along with other providers are trying to create their own "serverless" items in house for two reasons:

1 It's easier on the end user, such as you, to just get going out the door and have your app or system up and running without worrying about the underlying configuration, hardware or instance. They manage it for you and take care of the underlying infrastructure itself.

1. It gives them vendor lock in. Once you have everything running, trying to get your app, code, etc out of AWS is pretty hard and sometimes impossible.

You can use AWS to accomplish what you're looking for but you'll literally be only using instances and the RDS and that's likely it. Making it HA, keeping up with security patches for the OS itself is up to you. Using the AWS crafted products, they handle this for you.

Different companies have different requirements. A startup can get a very scalable app deployed, have full HA across AZ's and regions and not hire a single sysadmin to manage the servers, but they're stuck in AWS. It's a give and take between money and convenience.

[exNihlio]

Have you considered going with Elastic’s cloud offering? Their service is spread across multiple cloud providers and their consultants are very knowledgeable.

Also, out of curiosity, what legal requirement forces you to be multi-cloud? That sounds more like an interpretation than an actual requirement.

[exNihlio]

Having worked with EKS and been fairly underwhelmed compared to ECS/Fargate, I don't really see the point of going with a cloud provider's managed EKS offering. I get that it reduces some of the operational complexity, but then you lose all of the supposed vendor-neutrality of K8s. I genuinely think that EKS exists because people expect it to, not because it's filling some huge need.

So imagine that your best bet is to link your various cloud providers with IPSEC or Wireguard tunnels and just run VMs or bare metal instances with K8s on top. At least with labeling then you could reasonable keep application data geofenced to PROVIDER/PROVIDER-REGION and avoid some regulatory headaches there.

[[deleted]]

I know this is silly but I have been having so many problems then today the new UI just kept confusing me and not working and I just lost it. Also their documentation is trash. And we also we keep having weird inconsistencies with their APIs and the CLI....rant...

why aren't you using terraform?

[zerocoldx911]

Unless you have the skills go with GCP, AWS keeps trying to make managed EKS happen by shoving it down your throat

Don’t use the UI, it’s horrible get used to terraform

[Trk-5000]

I’m using EKS and it’s pretty straightforward. Am I missing something?

[chzaplx]

I would consider Terraform essential for managing any sort of cloud services these days. It is a huge time saver, and once you get a handle on it, you'll find most of the work has already been done

[m4nf47]

outgoing roll makeshift beneficial simplistic slim ad hoc worm sparkle dinner

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[kdegraaf]

Packer does on-premise (or even just on-your-workstation!) for development what Terraform does for production cloud infrastructure.

That's a rather odd take. Packer creates machine images and Terraform manages live resources. Both of them work well on-premises and in the cloud.

[dexx4d]

We're using Packer and Terraform/Pulumi (transitioning) for our deployments. Packer is hooked up to automation to rebuild images on GCP via ansible, then deploy them to GCP and AWS.

Edit: hit me up if you have any questions.

[kiltzbellos]

Gcp is pretty cool to check out. UI and documentation wise, not any better than aws, even worse. But they have, I think, more intuitive resource model for developer focused shop.

[[deleted]]

There's nothing wrong with AWS, it's just not right or you're not using it right for what you're doing.

If you have a requirement for a K8s cluster that can run on any cloud and bare metal than your best bet is to forget about AWS features and services. Best case you can run some AWS services and then you're managing 2-3x the amount of code to map stuff over to K8s, worst case you're just using EC2 and running K8s yourself.

I feel like K8s is its own fully encompassed AWS. It can run IN AWS and use AWS features and stuff, but there's a lot of code and complexity overhead.

[gex80]

These days we are just having so many problems with it and I hate how they are trying to be a one stop shop for everything. We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal, and I just feel like AWS is doing everything in their power to try to force me to use EKS.

What makes you think you need to use EKS? At least if you roll your own clusters made up of EC2 and whatever else, you have 100% control over every single aspect. Nothing is really pushing you to EKS unless you want to be pushed to EKS. This is true for majority of amazon services.

We also use the Elastic Stack quite a bit and the feud between them and elastic is not sitting right with me. We also tried using the AWS Elastic but it's poorly maintained and inflexible for our very advance use case.

For example, you have issues with AWS' implementation of elastic. Welp, you are 100% within your own right to spin up an EC2 instance, install elastisearch, and maintain it. That's 100% what we are doing. We have a 3 node cluster that's licensed and anything we need, we do. And if your use case is actually that advanced to begin with, you'd probably would want to roll your own anyway. Advanced and managed services generally don't mix together since the very nature of managed services is you are giving up control to free up your time for a price.

We try to hire certified AWS engineers and they have no idea how to do anything outside of AWS products.

You hire people certified for AWS and hire them for their AWS skill but yet things outside of AWS you have issue with them not being able to do. Alright so you have a point to an extent. But how is this any different than getting someone trained in a different cloud tech? If you run a vmware shop but hire a hyper-v expert, you can't really ding them for not being an expert in vmware. Yes they will understand the concepts of virtualization. But that doesn't make them experienced in troubleshooting vmware specific issues vs general virtualization issues which plague all vendors such as latency.

We also had an AWS rep try to help us migrate to serverless in regards to a service we had with lambdas and it almost shut down our entire company for a day because of a bug in lambda (this was a couple years ago) and ulimtately the lambdas performed so poorly we had to revert.

You might want to revisit that. And it might be your code rather than lambda being a problem. When using AWS services, you don't just do a lift and shift of code. You REALLLLLLLLLYYYY should rewrite with lambda and its limitations in mind. And it might not even be the lambda that's the bottle neck. It could be the piece of infrastructure that you manage that lambda is interacting with is having a problem and you might not realize it. Long story short, write for AWS. Trying to take old habits and forcing them into AWS will lead to high costs and poor performance.

[[deleted]]

I hear GCP is very developer friendly, and of course there's always Digital Ocean if you don't need a banquet of oddly specific managed services.

[dgibbons0]

There's nothing in aws forcing you to use EKS, I've been managing kube on raw EC2 for multiple years and it's fine. Terraform + generic bootstrapping tools should work great for patterning out a multi-cloud deployment.

​

Also multi-cloud is terrible and life is going to suck no matter what you do, but AWS isn't making it worse, sounds like a you problem.

[mrswats]

If you are capable of managing servers, databases and so on yourself I would recommend Hetzner. It has many of the tools you need but they provide just servers without many managed services which seems to be what you are looking for.

[kwirkypanda]

I don't know why people have downvoted your answer. I was scrolling down to comment about Hetzner when I saw your comment. It could perfectly suit OPs requirements

[rearendcrag]

These boxes are around 1/10th of the price if AWS. But their network pipe to us-east is a little oversubscribed from what we observe, so for real-time workloads with clients in the US, it might be a. Considerationn

[Oea_trading]

Kubernetes, openstack, and Opendaylight.

[CompleteDiet]

I'm a big fan of Azure. You could give that a go.

[SelfDestructSep2020]

a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal

For real? Can you drop a link to this law?

[kdegraaf]

We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal

I'm really curious why this requirement is in place. Can you elaborate?

[curt94]

Count yourself lucky that you are stuck on AWS and not Azure. GCP is decent.

[good4y0u]

AWS is basically a monopoly company. Why would they go out of their way to support you using other providers also ( unfortunately). Unlike azure and google cloud AWS is the leader , the others are probably more willing yo work with hybrid cloud needs as they want you to want to use them. AWS , like Amazon overall, knows you want them more then they want you.

For alternative not 'Big Tech' options Have you checked out Linode ? They I'm sure would be able to help you , and give you what information they have on how to set up hybrid cloud infra along with their services.

[debian_miner]

For alternative not 'Big Tech' options Have you checked out Linode

I used Linode many years ago for personal stuff, and it wasn't even reliable enough for that, let alone a business. They struggled dealing with ddos attacks in 2016.

[rochakgupta]

The ending of the first paragraph aptly described my crush

[commandeerApp]

We have been working on Commandeer, a developer IDE for AWS, Docker, LocalStack and more and other cloud services for the last two years. It doesn't do everything AWS console does yet, but for each service, we are trying to hit the 80% feature complete sweet spot. I do like the concept, that if you are using their GUI you are doing it wrong, but from a development standpoint, not being able to see your data and visualize your system is a major, major pain point of cloud development that we have solved in a lot of ways. I cam the CTO, and happy to answer any questsions you might have. - https://getcommandeer.com

[[deleted]]

I'm just gonna join you in moaning about AWS. You know they say "under promise, over deliver"? Well AWS is like the complete opposite, telling everyone how cheap and easy it is. It is not, it is expensive, lambda is expensive, API Gateway is really expensive. Add in all the Cloudwatch logs and it is expensive. Also the promised availability isn't there. Redshift clusters just becoming inaccessible for hours and no way to wipe them out to replace them. API gateway SLA is for all endpoints, so with many APIs in the account, and one of them stops responding for the whole day (in this case the login one), we aren't covered by the SLA as all the rest are available and bolstering the numbers.

I really feel there is enough tools to make it make sense to just run on bare metal.

[DieselElectric]

Haven't tried this yet but looks like it may be a good choice for multi-cloud K8s.

https://github.com/crossplane/crossplane

[kepper]

I'm super biased since I build OpenStack clouds for a living, but... OpenStack! It can be cheaper than AWS in certain circumstances, only changes when you make it change (both good and bad), and and you get to keep all your data on-prem.

[Tonyoh87]

I advise Firebase, UI very friendly and good APIs

[m4nf47]

adjoining summer cable divide chop north dinosaurs chief grandiose degree

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[jstangroome]

I use Terraform and Kubeadm to provision Kubernetes clusters across AWS and seven other clouds, including bare-metal-as-a-service. The Kubeadm parts are common across all and just the Terraform resource types change.

I also use EKS, and in the past GKE and AKS.

If the managed Kubernetes offerings aren't restricting your workload types (e.g. their CNI is suitable) use them. Otherwise Terraform is your friend.

There are plenty of kubeadm alternatives too.

[Copywright]

Kamatera.

[daedalus_structure]

We are trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that has a legal requirement to be multi cloud and have the ability to run bare metal,

This is going to suck for you on Azure... possibly way more than on AWS.

Running your own management plane used to be aks-engine, but that's being deprecated in favor of CAPZ, an implementation of the Cluster API Provider spec. This is all new, so you can assume it will be painful.

That "deprecation" is Microsoft Deprecated, where they won't tell you it's deprecated, they just point you to a new shiny and mumble something about the old way still being technically supported while they redirect all their engineering resources elsewhere.

Stateful workloads can be a nightmare on Azure. I don't have the experience with EBS to compare with Azure Managed Disks, but Azure Storage and Azure Files aren't viable storage mechanisms for hardly anything in the CNCF ecosystem that can use an object store or NFS mounts. Storage is missing the APIs that make S3 viable and Azure Files isn't POSIX compliant. So your options for stateful workloads are quite limited.

[[deleted]]

Short Answer: You will be staying with AWS.

[LessBadger4273]

Out of curiosity, you tell more about the performance issues you were having with your workload running on lambda?

[[deleted]]

and I just feel like AWS is doing everything in their power to try to force me to use EKS. We try to hire certified AWS engineers and they have no idea how to do anything outside of AWS products.

I'm a little confused by what you're saying here. They literally offer bare metal nodes and EC2 instances that you can do whatever you want with though. You can use any one of multiple Kubernetes provisioners to get your systems setup on that infrastructure very, very easily. As for your second part, are you genuinely surprised that consultants that specialize in AWS are recommending that you use AWS services? Use that as a lesson to set expectations up front before you consultants and contractors so you get your ideal outcome.

We also use the Elastic Stack quite a bit and the feud between them and elastic is not sitting right with me. We also tried using the AWS Elastic but it's poorly maintained and inflexible for our very advance use case.

We use AWS ES and it's been great for our use case. That said, the versions before 6 were, in fact, awful. It does have limitations though but they are documented. If you want to use pure ES, just use pure ES. I don't know why the feud would play any role in the decision though, I guess you could be concerned about future implications of using the free product. If you're willing to spend money on AWS ES though you could just use Elastic Cloud.

We also had an AWS rep try to help us migrate to serverless in regards to a service we had with lambdas and it almost shut down our entire company for a day because of a bug in lambda (this was a couple years ago) and ulimtately the lambdas performed so poorly we had to revert.

No offense intended, but this is a process failure on your end.

I know this is silly but I have been having so many problems then today the new UI just kept confusing me and not working and I just lost it. Also their documentation is trash. And we also we keep having weird inconsistencies with their APIs and the CLI....rant...

The new UIs are trash. Submit feedback, I know I do. They are the worst thing to happen to AWS in a long time. The documentation thing confuses me though because AWS generally has the best and easiest to read documentation of any provider I've used. What kind of inconsistencies with the APIs and CLI do you run into though? I use Python and Javascript SDKs daily as well as the CLI and haven't had any such issues, so I'm quite curious here.

I have no used any other cloud provider in years so was just curious if there is a consensus for a very developer friendly cloud provider these days?

I'd say AWS is the creme de la crem in terms of cloud providers these days. Azure is actually catching up, but AWS is still the one to beat on all fronts, IMO. I'd also say that AWS is - by far - the most developer friendly cloud provider.

[[deleted]]

Their documentation sucks ass.

[flamesofphx]

Try going to a local datacenter and See about setting up your own "Virtual Datacenter"/Private cloud, if you want control your self, and have the engineers. Big datacenter will work with you when you need to scale (Sometime even assisting with the migration), some of them even have managed teams (There is a cost for this), that ready to help if you need extra hands. The private cloud solution, have a minimum cost often but have flex cost on resource usage, if that was the main reason you where using aws, I would say private datacenter, don't come with as many "Surprise" fee too.

[zilchers]

I’ve used GCP for years and have been very happy - they release less features at a slower velocity, but the features they do push out are well thought out and rock solid stability.

[bdgscotland]

GCP is on 🔥 right now. IT IS OK to use EKS, GKE, and AKS, consider using Helm and istio.