knowhy

I'm a Linux infrastructure engineer. I'm having a hard time in finding a position which doesn't sound like a total nightmare to begin with. All I see these days involves Kubernetes. I had my fair share of k8s and I'm not a fan. I'm not totally against it, there are legit use cases for it. But for the companies I interview with it almost always seems a bad choice and sign of a poor overall architecture and management.

Usually I'm confronted with something like this: an external developer or consulting agency has setup an initial container environment. And now the company is looking for someone to take over the environment. Usually nobody in the company has ever worked with Docker. All are full of high hopes and unrealistic expectations. Everyone thinks that the initial setup was the hard part and operating it will be an easy job. A lot of money and effort has been invested. The CTO got his job by pitching "let's decouple the monolith into modern micro-services", but there is only nihilism beyond that.

So much has been invested into this micro-service thing. The plan is perfect. Now I'm being asked to take over responsibility for this Frankenstein stack full of alpha quality software and good for now code. Nobody foresaw the heavy footprint of clustering everything. So there is no budget for a test environment.

I like KISS and boring code. Some ideas of DevOps are appealing to me but with the situation today it feels like going back to square one. Bringing up even the slightest critic of micro services leads to someone acting like repeating the GCP/AWS sales pitch would be an original idea.

Sometimes I stumble over comments here which give me glimpse of hope that some people are waking up and get a more realistic view on micro services. But I fear it will take a while until that will have an impact on my local job market. How long might that take? What can I do with this situation?