One of the broadly accepted things among at least system administrators is that our own code is a liability (some programmers may resist this idea somewhat more). If your systems run on a collection of locally developed, bespoke programs, scripts, and so on, someone has to maintain and update all of that ( I sort of wrote about this long ago , also ). If you use standard programs instead (or at least as much standard code as possible), hopefully someone else does that, and you can choose which programs and what code to use based on how well maintained it seems to be at the moment.

(This breaks down when you're large enough, but I'm talking about more modest sized organizations or groups.)

It's recently struck me that the obvious extension of this is that configuration and configuration files are also a cost and a liability (partly as a result of thinking about the staff time cost of our email system ). This is obvious when a configuration file embeds what is effectively code, such as Prometheus alerting rules (which have a whole array of clever tricks that you wind up learning), because code in any form is still code. But it goes beyond such embedded code into any configuration that you have to maintain. If you need a complex Bind configuration file or a complex DHCP setup or a tangled Apache configuration (perhaps for a very special server ), some day they're probably going to have to be changed or at least understood again.

We can't operate with no configuration and we shouldn't try to. Under the right circumstances, code and configuration are both more of an asset than a liability. But I think we should be cautious about it. Just because we can create a complex configuration that does a lot doesn't mean that we should. It's tempting to create a complex configuration that does lots of things to meet your needs and support all the features you want, and at least for me there's an appealing problem solving aspect to it. But the result can be something that has long term costs and consequences.

Have I created some overly complicated configurations at work ? Probably yes. These configurations have given us useful or important features, but they've also saddled us with complexity that we're now stuck with because we (the sysadmins) and other people have come to depend on the features the configurations create.

(Ultimately, one issue is that as a system administrator, it's hard to persuade myself to leave a problem unsolved. Simpler configurations usually mean living without things and we often put in the things for good reason, so simple configurations would require telling more people "you can't have that because we don't feel it's a good idea to support it, although we could".)