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March 18, 2003
MCSE? Why Bother?
Thinking of getting the worlds most useless qualification? No I don't mean a mail order degree from an unaccredited institution. I'm talking about becoming a Microslosh Certifiable Something Else (MCSE). Don't bother. Microslosh are about to put you out of work: Microslosh explores self-managing software.
OK. Here is the deal. Some time ago (1993), some dude got all excited about trying to manage hetrogeneous networks of systems. The result was Cfengine. Sort of worked, quite complex and can be just as unmanageable as the network if not used correctly (i.e. when you get grad students to set it up). This has more recently evolved to v2 with all sorts of bells and whistles (included better control of the grad students). As with all really great stuff which starts out seeming a bit strange, the software is free (as in beer?).
Then the commercial guys started to get excited about this distributed management plus load sharing and application distribution and all that. First cab off the rank that I spotted was N1 (Sun) closely followed by IBM and HP (note all UNIX solutions). Lots of hot air, not much tangible in terms of user stories and real-life test beds yet.
Now all of a sudden, the company that still can't solve the blue screen of death, cannot design secure software, cannot design tasteful interfaces and is the worlds largest convicted monopolist has decided that it will do this too. Now instead of having useless software running on nodes supported by hundreds of MCSEs, we will now have useless software running on nodes controlled by other nodes also running useless software which will be managed by thousands of MSCEs. Oh.
Sorry, false alarm. Lots of MSCEs now required to manage self managing automatically failing software.....
BTW I have worked at a site with ~100 nodes managed using cfengine.
Posted by Ozguru at March 18, 2003 12:03 PM
