I’ve been doing a lot more research lately in an attempt to get up-to-date on the world as it exists in the enterprise IT operations world. Just a few years ago I was throwing server racks into the back of my Hyundai and driving them between sites during planned outages, holding desperate calls with my networking administrator in Sweden, and trying my damndest to read port numbers off the back of a Cisco switch with hot air blowing in my face. It was a fun time.
Nowadays, most of those responsibilities are squirreled away to the people who now have those jobs. And, to be clear, while it requires some muscle, some finagling, and the right body type to be able to squeeze back into those cages, I’m happier and more comfortable with my current responsibilities. One of those is generating new infrastructure for projects to run on. The tool I’ve been using so far for this is Terraform.
I got familiarized with the Terraform/Hashicorp suite a few years ago when my boss at the time stuck his head into my cubicle and asked if I was familiar with security. I had recently passed the CompTIA exam on the subject, so I said yes. In a week, I was being shuffled between Chicago and a desert military airport, living off local pizza, and powering a massive push towards managing secrets within a vendor who shall remain anonymous on this public record. I spent a lot of time with a pair of local code monkeys who worked with me on installing the various network and virtualized components of the stack and came to realize that nobody made the kind of money working on a Windows PC that they do staring at an open-sourced Terminal window. I was already hooked.
That was one of the funny aspects of sysadmin work. They place you in front of the computer that looks like, well, nothing. Your username@localhost prompt hangs empty in space. You hit the enter key and it appears again. Anything that could be useful is invisible. Sure, there’s an infinite number of helpful videos and the direct access to any number of man pages that you want to read, but there’s no standard accepted curriculum that you can go through and obtain a certificate with: there’s a massive number of competing ones, all and none of which get you where you want or need to go.
I want to pay special attention to the blankness of the terminal screen. While the macOS version of Terminal comes in white as its default, I typically use a black and green tone which is easier on the eyes. Plus, it reminds me of the Matrix and puts me in a hacky mindset. In any case, when you open it up, you see a wide, empty page. Nothing to click on. No blue Finder smile or umber toned Ubuntu charm. It’s not shocking that an earlier generation of potential users looked at this yawning void and, rather than going mad with forbidden knowledge, simply chose to unplug it and wait until the market offered them something better.
But it’s in that Terminal, iTerm, or PuTTy window where the real magic happens. If you know what you’re doing, you can pluck the hair from the back of a mouse and make a mountain vanish into thin air. Crank out a website or ten, evangelize it to the world, and destroy it in a space of a few lines. And of course, make more money.
It’s that direct relationship between learnability and economic desirability that interests me the most. I’ve tried to teach friends of mine who were interested in this field how to get started, mostly by walking them through the steps to install VirtualBox, download a Linux distro, and spin one up. I was hoping that this trajectory would push some of my friends towards higher goals, and perhaps even greater career challenges. There’s no growing business left that doesn’t incorporate code, IT, and web presence, so these skills will be highly valued no matter where you decide to go.
But most people look at their home PC and see it as a video game machine. I certainly do sometimes. And the dazzling world of StarCraft and League of Legends is so much more organic than the blank slate that demands input like sudo docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 80:80 -p 443:443 rancher/rancher so I don’t blame them for not trying. And, fortunately for people like me, that Bash script and the Terminal that I’m writing it in aren’t going out of style for a very long time.
I got kind of offbeat with this entry, so I’ll try to focus harder on what Terraform is in my next episode. Thank you so much for reading, and let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like me to write about.