City of Munich Now a Major Contributor to Open Source
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
But even big Windows shops don't have one admin for every 10 Windows machines, it's probably closer to 50 or 100, or more. But you're right in that you can have many many times that number of servers per admin for Linux.
Actually that's not generally true. Only super high end Windows shops ever get above 30 per admin. More typically, even on Wall St. in a good shop I have seen around 35 per admin (and those admins are pushing $180K so don't start saying that the UNIX people are insanely expensive at $200K) and bad ones are around 5-10.
Same shop with 35 per Windows had 300 per UNIX. That's anecdotal, but a real world, 20% price difference in pay number shop.
In the low end shop on Wall St. it was more like 10 per Windows and 150 per UNIX.
I gotta ask - what makes managing those Windows boxes so much more time consuming? At that pay rate, those guys are should definitely be doing things as automatedly (made up word?) as possible, using scripts, etc.
Assuming the UNIX boxes all do the same thing, sure you can stack more boxes on one person, but if they are all unique, what is the support per admin numbers look like? Closer to Windows at 35?
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UNIX also allows you to change hardware. It's not just about getting better density on the same boxes, it lets you move to different architectures (ARM, POWER, Sparc, Itanium) which let you go to faster machines, bigger hardware, mainframes, etc. which can result in even more cost savings at scale. At the very least, it offers more options.
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@Dashrender said:
Assuming the UNIX boxes all do the same thing, sure you can stack more boxes on one person, but if they are all unique, what is the support per admin numbers look like? Closer to Windows at 35?
That's why I use the term snowflake. The 50% - 80% reduction in staff is done in a snowflake environment where every box is unique. In the DevOps world, where we assume they are not unique, that's where you get the 1,000% or more reduction.
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That is bending my mind that you can get 50-80% reduction in a snowflake environment.
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@Dashrender said:
I gotta ask - what makes managing those Windows boxes so much more time consuming? At that pay rate, those guys are should definitely be doing things as automatedly (made up word?) as possible, using scripts, etc.
Automating Windows is still considered, a specialist task. At $100K you have UNIX admins who automate with nearly every key stroke. At the same price, Windows admins do so rarely. UNIX is designed top to bottom around automation and everything in the culture is based around it. Windows is making incredible strides in this area but is nowhere near there yet - more because of the culture than because of the tooling. But the tooling is very new still.
But how many Windows shops can, with zero effort, poll every server that they have, instantly, and get a report on uptime, for example? This is simply a "command" in UNIX. No planning needed, no setup, no special tools. It just works.
In Windows you have to plan to automate, in UNIX it often "just happens."
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I'd be surprised today if that particular request wasn't just a command today on Windows too ( a powershell command), but you're right it's definitely a culture thing.
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@Dashrender said:
I'd be surprised today if that particular request wasn't just a command today on Windows too ( a powershell command), but you're right it's definitely a culture thing.
It might be. But every UNIX admin, even juniors, know how to do that. In Windows, outside of Rob and Martin who teach PowerShell, find me anyone who can do it without looking it up and even then, maybe it is challenging.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'd be surprised today if that particular request wasn't just a command today on Windows too ( a powershell command), but you're right it's definitely a culture thing.
It might be. But every UNIX admin, even juniors, know how to do that. In Windows, outside of Rob and Martin who teach PowerShell, find me anyone who can do it without looking it up and even then, maybe it is challenging.
I'll definitely give you that.
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And UNIX can do it without an infrastructure like AD if you don't want one. Windows "can" too but you give up a lot to do it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And UNIX can do it without an infrastructure like AD if you don't want one. Windows "can" too but you give up a lot to do it.
Does that assume that all of the UNIX boxes have the same username and password setup on every box?
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@scottalanmiller said:
And UNIX can do it without an infrastructure like AD if you don't want one. Windows "can" too but you give up a lot to do it.
@Dashrender said:
Does that assume that all of the UNIX boxes have the same username and password setup on every box?
On this note, I am with @Dashrender as you have to plan ahead with credentials or SSH keys in *nix and in Windows you plan ahead with AD or local accounts. Either way this one is a wash not a savings.
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@Dashrender said:
Does that assume that all of the UNIX boxes have the same username and password setup on every box?
Yes, but generally your build scripts do that so it is zero effort in most shops. Like at NTG, the same basic build script that installs base packages like fail2ban also puts in user accounts, their keys, etc. It's about the lowest effort thing that you can do.
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@JaredBusch said:
On this note, I am with @Dashrender as you have to plan ahead with credentials or SSH keys in *nix and in Windows you plan ahead with AD or local accounts. Either way this one is a wash not a savings.
Having done both, I would call it a pretty big savings. No extra infrastructure, effectively no management.
