I don’t think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it’s a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.
I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.
Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.
This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.
I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).
Yeah, AI is going to put some people out of work, but in turn will open lots of more specialized positions. And these positions that are lost could adapt to AI (for example, being part of the training instead of just being let go).
I mean, isn’t that what “get on or get left behind” means?
It does not necessarily mean you’ll lose your job. Nor does “get on” mean you have to become a specialist on it.
The post picks specifically on things that didn’t catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.
Yeah, I realized it suffers from (inverse) survivorship bias, only pointing out the ones that didn’t survive.
Didn’t one company claim something like “the internet is a fad” or “touchscreen phones are a fad” and went bankrupt/became irrelevant because they didn’t adapt?
Remember when “The Cloud” was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?
Many of our customers store their backups in our “cloud storage solution”.
I think they’d be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.
Naming it “The Cloud” and not “Someone else’s old computer running in their basement” was a smart move though.
It just sounds better.
I don’t think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it’s a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.
I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.
Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.
This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.
I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).
And some companies (like mine) just have their SDEs do the SRE job as well. Apparently it incentivizes us to write more stable code or something
Yeah, AI is going to put some people out of work, but in turn will open lots of more specialized positions. And these positions that are lost could adapt to AI (for example, being part of the training instead of just being let go).
There is still difference.
Cloud was FOR the IT people. Machine learning is for predicting patterns following data.
Maybe stock predictors will adapt or replace but average programmer didn’t have to switch to replit because it’s “cloud IDE”
I mean, isn’t that what “get on or get left behind” means?
It does not necessarily mean you’ll lose your job. Nor does “get on” mean you have to become a specialist on it.
The post picks specifically on things that didn’t catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.
Yeah, I realized it suffers from (inverse) survivorship bias, only pointing out the ones that didn’t survive.
Didn’t one company claim something like “the internet is a fad” or “touchscreen phones are a fad” and went bankrupt/became irrelevant because they didn’t adapt?
Blackberry? I was like 10 at the time so this is based off my memory of who had what phone but that seems like the right guess
Yep, I didn’t remember well so I didn’t know for certain.