For PyOhio 2016 I gave a short talk on managing infrastructure. You can watch the talk on youtube or look at the slides. The talk starts with a short poem printed below for posterity. I also created a super simple demo which I did not have time to show. You can download a tarball of the demo. To run the demo you are going to need vagrant and the "hasicorp/precise64" box. No guarantees it works, I wrote it in an hour or so to make sure everything in the presentation was sensible.

The World is Changing

by Tim Henderson

death of a sys-admin

One person.
Alone.
Do the many keyboards
Make the work light?

In the dead of the night,
How the flickers
Of the tubes
Shine so bright.

Two hands
Ten fingers
Typing so swift.
On keys, mechanical,
You can hear them click.

A machine.
One then another,
Fixed.
The backlog clean.

Now it is June,
An evening star in the sky.
The sys-admin feels the breeze
As seagulls fly by.

Back in the office
Are the keyboards lonely?
A customer wonders:
Why do my pages
Load slowly?

there are too many machines

The flickering screens,
Can not keeps pace
With the whirring fans.

The blades spin
As the AC hums.
The metal racks gleam
The floor it glows.

But. Not enough,
Not enough dollars.
For too few cents,
Per page view is made.

Where is the sys-admin?
They left last May.
None to replace them,
For we couldn’t pay.

now, we have become root

The humble programmer.
One keyboard,
One screen!

No rituals on approach.
No doors to knock.
Just expensive headphones
Fuzzing with static.

In the fields of desks
By the window so small
Sits the humble programmer
Trying to stay away
From it all.

But alas!
The servers are down.
Sys-admins?
None to be found!

To the command-line?
Neigh!
To the ansible, we pray!

Provision
Config
Deploy

The chant
Doth resound.