Demand for programmers who know system admin stuff

[Matt Graham]

On 2022-01-19 11:44, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> On 2022-01-07 20:43, Thomas Scott via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> then got back
>> into programming, because it was a "thing" to automate networks. It's
>> now my full time job, and I enjoy it a ton. The network to code slack
>> is full of network engineers who have become that new hybrid. Sorry 
>> if
>> that doesn't help from the opposite direction!
> As a PHP developer what do you suggest I learn about automation?  And
> do I really need to learn another language?  Seems a lot is being done
> in PHP.

"Automation" is kind of vague here.  A more precise definition of what 
I have usually seen is "setting up a new web server exactly like one we 
already have."  Or potentially "building a new Docker image out of the 
latest code in branch A of github repository B, then deploying that 
image to Elastic Beanstalk, every time someone changes branch A."  But 
yes, you will probably need to learn whatever language the scripts that 
run whatever they're automating is written in.

> I think someone suggested Python.  Was it Python? And why Python?  Is
> it better than PHP for server automation?

The answer is probably that python is currently more fashionable than 
PHP.  Anything Turing-complete can be used to run scripts.  I wouldn't 
even call it automation, but several projects at work have deploy.sh in 
the root directory.  Did something pass code review and get merged?  
Push it to QA by doing "./deploy.sh qa".  Did it pass QA?  Push it to 
production with "./deploy.sh prod".  (Mostly, this just saves a little 
time typing.)

Also, it's good to have a backup plan to run things manually if 
necessary.  The latest AWS outage made it impossible for us to deploy 
new code to one project at all, because the automated CI process 
attached to it requires specific parts of AWS in the us-west region to 
be up and working.  Fortunately, we could wait a couple of hours.

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