On 27/10/2025 21:26, Alaric Snell-Pym via Silklist wrote:
but everything involving configuring different software packages to work together really shouldn't be something *everyone* has to fiddle with
I've been trotting out a thesis for a decade or more saying that we've recently reached the end of a multi-century journey to make best practice knowledge in various domains accessible. I worry I may had said this here before but hey, I guess the topic of running your own infra is a repeat topic too.
Know-how went from inaccessible, to only accessible if you found the right person and basically committed your life (and name!) to the craft starting with being their apprentice, to books, libraries etc. And finally with the internet maturing you can pretty much access info for how to do pretty much anything.
So what's the next barrier? My take: deployment -- the effort to choose/assess, get buy-in/communication, configure, deploy, maintain and extend etc.
When on my 3rd multi-environment devops setup from scratch in a year (a long time ago) I dreamed of a sub 1hr consult / form which asked me a bunch of questions and got me to install a few probes, after which it created a plan with meeting invites ready to send for sign off from management and to explain things to various staff groups, with logins to various tools such as swapping on-call rotas, a wiki with system and procedure documentation, tooling and user accounts set up, an engineer competency self-assessment form to allow for a training plan to be advised, yadda yadda. If the plan includes the plan for how to take the semi-personalised initial roll out and improve it to your situation (which is what you should be doing forever anyway) then this felt very doable in a repeatable way for maybe 10-20x the effort of doing it once.
I'm still waiting for deployment as a product. It feels like the sort of thing that maybe is may finally start to see with AI.
mx -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
