> From an outsider's perspective it feels that, aside from Nix, there has not been any theoretic or standards progress in this field since Mark Burgess' time.
Because there wasn't much progress indeed. IT operations is a field advanced
by programmers, and most programmers have very little experience with (or even
interest in) system administration, so the progress of the field is mainly
governed by clueless outsiders oblivious to all the tools and mechanisms
already in use. That's why it's a huge pile of mess.
The thing that kills me is the preconcevied we have to use $TOOL behaviors. Lets use docker as a deployment tool, where we are putting one container on each VM... Combined with the complete ignorance of packaging. 99% of the problems I hear people trying to solve with docker would be better solved with a 'postinstall' hook in a package called 'my_configuration' (it helps you with configuration versioning and in place upgrades!!!!). Combined with the complete lack of understanding what something like kickstart/autoYast can do.
It seems that in a huge number of cases, its possible to trim out the vast majority of the layers of deployment/etc crap with just a bit of KISS and using tools which are already installed...
Because there wasn't much progress indeed. IT operations is a field advanced by programmers, and most programmers have very little experience with (or even interest in) system administration, so the progress of the field is mainly governed by clueless outsiders oblivious to all the tools and mechanisms already in use. That's why it's a huge pile of mess.