And, honestly, I miss the old days. Today, $cloud has some weird spasms where you suddenly get an influx of connection timeouts or tasks waiting for aeons to get scheduled and you just can't log in to a switch or a machine and figure out what the exact hell is going on. You just watch the evergreen $cloud status page, maybe file some tickets and pray someone bothers to investigate, or maybe live with those random hiccups "sorry $boss, everything is 100% good on our side, it's $cloud misbehaving today", adding more resilience -> complexity -> unreliability in the name of reliability to the system. Either way, with the clouds I feel handicapped, lacking the ability to diagnose things when they go wrong.
I don't miss those three days we spent fighting a kernel panic. Was about a decade ago - we outgrew the hardware and had to get a new one with a badass-at-the-time 10GB SFP+ NIC that worked nice for the first few weeks but then its driver suddenly decided to throw some tantrums on almost a hourly basis. I don't even remember the details - a lot of time flew since then, but thankfully we found some patch somewhere in the depths of LKML and the server was a perfect clockwork ever since. That wasn't fun, but that was an one-in-many years incident.
Either way, I do feel that in the ancient ages hardware and software used to be so much more simple and reliable. Like, today people start with those multi-node high-availability all-the-buzzwords Kubernetes-in-the-cloud monstrosities that still fail now and then (because there are so many moving parts shit's just bound to fail at incredible rate), and in the good old days people somehow managed to have a couple of servers in the rack - some proper, some just desktop towers sitting by - and with some duct tape and elbow grease those ran without incidents for years and years.
Have I turned old and sour? Or maybe it's just the nostalgia about the youth, and I've forgotten or diminished most the issues while warmly remembering all the good moments?
