First off, before the flames start (if anybody actually reads this), this article is from the perspective of a consultant currently working with roughly two dozen web start-ups. Based on what I’ve observed with numerous customers over the past five years, and the current reality, in my world, these tools don’t matter. Most of them are relegated to academic operations, the kind of people who keep Usenix going but just aren’t part of my world.
- Any Linux Distribution that is not RedHat CentOS, or Ubuntu
- CFENGINE
- Itanium or any non x86-64 processing architectures
- BCFG2
- FreeBSD
- OS X Server (It never really was relevant, to anybody, anywhere, but it’s fun to
- CVSup
- Windows Server
- Solaris (Sorry Tim, I’ve got nothing but love for you, but Sun has long since lost it’s relevance for web start-ups)
- Oracle
- SQL Server
- Cold Fusion (wtf is that anyways?)
- Andrew File System
I make this pledge. If you’re using more than two of these technologies in a vc-funded start-up newly founded in the past two years, I owe you a scotch.
4 responses so far ↓
grrrreg // August 25, 2009 at 2:59 pm |
“_in_my_world_, these tools don’t matter. ”
Happy I do’nt belong to yours.
Nathan Eisenberg // August 25, 2009 at 6:44 pm |
I would have to disagree about the following:
Ubuntu – I’d rather use the parent, Debian. In my experience, the dependencies are cleaner, and things like the XEN package work out of the box.
FreeBSD – The PF package is one of the very best packet filtering engines out there. PFSense is built on FreeBSD.
Windows Server – Really? It’s one of the most widely deployed server operating systems, with a huge install base. I’d say it’s very relevant for SAs.
SQL Server – Again, really? Huge install base, widely used. Very relevant for SAs.
You also listed
‘Any Linux Distribution that is not RedHat CentOS, or Ubuntu’ and
‘Linux Distributions that are not RedHat, CentOS, or Ubuntu’, which seems somewhat redundant.
mhalligan // August 25, 2009 at 10:53 pm |
Nathan,
There was a time when academia defined the trends and technologies which became industry standards. Then for a while, it was big business. Both of those eras have made way for tech start-ups as the originators of standards.
Take memcached for example. The web would fall apart without it. Puppet and Chef are both rapidly gaining market share in the application management realm because of the high-profile startups who use them.
I’m not debating, or even beginning to belittle the technical superiority of some technologies that have failed to gain or keep market share. FreeBSD and Solaris will always have it’s place in the history books under “Sexy technologies who failed to establish or maintain relevancy”.
Beyond the handful of cute, insignificant Seattle based start-ups, who really uses Windows Server or SQL Server in their start-ups?
And Debian? Debian has never really mattered because it has never had any real driving force. It’s technology for engineers, by engineers, business needs be damned.
phessler // August 27, 2009 at 6:01 am |
@nathan if you like PF on FreeBSD, you should try it on OpenBSD. Original platform, better integration, many more features and improvements.