Does anyone need Open Source Software ?
My career started off working as a civilian in the (Canadian) armed forces, submarine tracking. We were using a mainframe that, to be honest, was ahead of its time. It was called (Honeywell) Multics, pre-dated Unix, and was a thing of beauty. It had flashing lights, magnetic tape drives, a massive 2MB memory, spinning platters for storage, electricity consumption approaching that of a small town, and you'd need a multi-million dollar budget to acquire one. Programming in PL/1 on top of an operating system that supported interactivity (not just batch), multi-user, folders, security, was revolutionary.
Honeywell Multics Control Panel
Fast forwards (a lot of years!) and as a closet developer, I transitioned to C, then C++, then C# and many years ago, signed up as a developer to Microsoft's Developer Network. That (MSDN) membership meant that Kool-Aid was included/free and available in vast quantities, and in discussions with friends and family.. there was only one way forwards in application development and deployment, Microsoft Windows. I used Visual Studio, I used the .NET Framework, I used MFC, I used SQL Server, it was great, why would you need anything else ? Others were trying to run interference and start talking about Open Source Software like PostgreSQL, Git, Eclipse, and oh my goodness... Linux. Why on earth would you want an operating system like Linux where you had to type 'command lines' !, point and click is where it's at, give me a mouse any day. I must also own up that I was one of the few that invested in a Microsoft Windows Phone and felt my life was complete. I could code front ends, user interfaces, backends on Windows Server, mobile apps... At one point, my 19" rack at home housed ten (bare metal!) Windows servers. I could code, test and deploy, I was in DevOps heaven.
For years I thought... application deployment was about .. writing an application, test/debug/fix a few bugs, then deploy (Windows Installer). I even had some business/production deployments of code. Updating the code, meant getting in the car, or, remote desktop (RDP) where possible. Once the software was installed, you then start wondering; what's it doing, how many times did it do it, did any of the inputs cause exceptions, is it running slow/fast? I could produce some data (metrics) but how am I going to collect/display/interrogate? more coding. Logs... Windows Event Log is ... ok, but I need more... I should code something... I need to scale, but how? Then I fell into the .. well it works in my environment but doesn't work at the customer's. Then, the unthinkable happened "You don't have Windows?, Are you mad?" which coincided with the Kool-Aid running out. All of a sudden, stranded on the island that is Microsoft Windows.
Around 2017/8, I stumbled on .NET Core, a cross platform (operating system) development framework. It allows you to continue writing C# but that will run anywhere that you can install a dotnet runtime. I can develop and build/run containers on my Windows PC, I can them on my Synology NAS, I can push them to the Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), run them up in Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) or Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Just so much magic happening. It took me a while to adjust and have weaned myself off the Windows Kool-Aid.
Fast forward to today, and whilst still an avid C# developer I wholeheartedly embrace Linux (including Windows Subsystem Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL), virtual machines, Docker/containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Git(Hub/Lab), Ansible, Terraform, PostreSQL/MariaDB/MySQL, Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, Redis and the list goes on. It's just awesomeness, and to show you how much, even my first Multics mainframe is available as a downloadable container!
So what's the bottom line behind the story? My journey has been one of evolution, incremental steps, discovering what works and doesn't work, what's a good fit, discovering the benefits. Yours should be too. As an organisation, if you're striving for cloud and all the benefits it provides, make sure you're in the right place on your journey to make that leap. Strive for the vision, but don't try jumping the chasm. Make sure you've got a good DevOps process.. "you develop/build it, you run it..", which also means "If it catches on fire, you put it out". If you want to chat/debate over a coffee... I'm up for that!
Let me know your thoughts, your journey..
One final note.. Open Source is a reflection of what all communities should be like, one of collaboration, care and contribution. I only wish that countries, people/factions, politics would adhere to the same beliefs.
Stay safe and be kind.
