Re: Enterprise and Debian Pure Blends
"Jesús M. Navarro" <jesus.navarro@undominio.net> writes:
> On Wednesday 01 September 2010 20:31:06 Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think this is all true, but I also do want to note that all that
>> user-friendliness is much less helpful when you're talking about a
>> large enterprise scale. I think it's an interesting problem to solve
>> for smaller sites, but for example Stanford wouldn't use any of that
>> even if it were at the level of quality that Microsoft provides.
> Uhmmm. I wouldn't be so sure.
I'm the technical lead for Stanford's central infrastructure, and I'm
fairly sure. :) As soon as you introduce a configuration management
system, for example, a lot of that automation is no longer useful, since
it manages configuration files you're now managing another way. Or, for
example, it may be built on top of storing all your configuration in LDAP
as much as possible, which in my experience is a rather bad configuration
management system. (We try not to source anyting directly out of LDAP; we
source everything out of relational databases and push from there into
LDAP. LDAP just doesn't have the right sort of structure.)
I realize that Microsoft does a lot of the things that I wouldn't do, like
merge LDAP and the KDC and use LDAP as the configuration management
database (in part), but I do think that makes Microsoft systems harder to
manage than they would be otherwise.
> It certainly would look like that looking backwards, but think that
> Stanford takes quite a lot from "the old days" much like MIT's Athena.
Not really, not any more.
> Again, I wouldn't be so sure. That's the way *now*, true, but I'd say
> that's mainly because of lacking of standards and enough maturity, so
> almost everybody, specially the big ones, needed to invent their own
> way.
> Look at the way aviation, electricity, landline communications,
> etc. evolved and you'll see the future of IT: we are just now going past
> the era of the pioneers, where almost everything needed to be done
> taylor-made because of the lack of anything better, and starting the era
> of standards, best practices, abstractions and modularity just like now
> almost no company deploys its own electricity central or nobody builds a
> plane or a building from taylor-made components but from standardized
> ones.
I'll believe that once I'm not spending most of my time deploying new
services that I'd never heard of five years ago. We seem to still be in
the destabilizing growth phase as far as I can tell. Those areas are run
the way they are because their fundamental product has not changed that
much in twenty, thirty, forty years. Nothing involved in running
enterprise infrastructure higher than the level of a TCP/IP network can
really say that; even Kerberos is significantly different today than it
was 15 years ago. And even with a TCP/IP network, look at wireless.
I think you'll be right eventually. I think we're still 20 years away
from you being right.
It is, however, always possible that I'm too pessimistic.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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