alt Hacker NewsI'm left wondering if maybe all the years I spend tinkering with Linux servers and self-hosted infrastructure are just about to pay off big time now that there is a massive move for governments and institutions to take control of their infrastructure... You still pretty much need a human to spin and maintain infrastructure, wire things securely, and monitor... Now I just need to wait until someone rebrands sysop into something cool sounding like Sovereign Re-orchestration Professional, or Reacquisition Specialist... Data Nationalisation Champion
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Why not - eventually it will be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
Joking aside, there is a lot of contract work to help EU quasi-governative entities to move off US clouds. I have been on contract for the last 18 months to recreate some functionality of AWS on top of OVH for a client adjacent to the European Space Agency.
The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
My other EU client, a much smaller non-tech company for whom I host their servers, has recently wanted to know if we depend on any US services, to reduce their exposure.
I believe you can get decent work just by advertising yourself as an expert in migrating code and data out of the US.
That said, the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
Cloud repatriation engineer, infra sovereignty strategist. Are sysadmins back? Too early to tell imho.
I do this at significant scale and you need a high tolerance for a lot of different negatives to last doing it for governments (and adjacent).
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
I got hired by a local company exactly for my experience with running linux servers at home and in a semi-professional capacity. They had hired someone with perfect credentials from university with several masters degrees, but they had to let him go after half a year because he did not fit in to their linux environment that has been operating since the 90s. I had no formal education, but many years with tinkering, self-hosting and operating linux machines for a small number of customers, and they could not hire me fast enough. They told me that it is really hard to come by people with this mix of experiences, everything is in the clouds these days.