Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down and grab a cup of coffee that's been on the burner since dawn. I just stumbled across this... masterpiece of modern engineering, and it's got my mustache twitching. Let ol' Rick tell you a thing or two about how you kids are re-inventing the flat tire and calling it a breakthrough in transportation.
So, they're talking about deploying "Elastic Agents" in "air-gapped environments." My sides. You know what we called an air-gapped environment back in my day? A computer. It wasn't connected to ARPANET, it wasn't "phoning home," it was sitting in a refrigerated room, connected to nothing but power and a line printer that sounded like a machine gun. The fact that you have to write a novel-length instruction manual on how to run your software without the internet is not a feature; it's a confession that you designed it wrong in the first place.
But let's break this down, shall we?
You're telling me the solution involves setting up a "Fleet Server" with internet access, downloading a "Package Registry," then carrying it over to the secure zone on a thumb drive like it's some kind of state secret? Congratulations, you've just invented the sneakernet. We were doing that in 1983, but we were carrying 9-track tapes that weighed more than your intern, and we didn't write a self-congratulatory blog post about it. We just called it "Monday." The sheer complexity—download the agent, get the policy, enroll the thing, package the artifacts—it's a Rube Goldberg machine of YAML files and CLI commands to do what a single JCL job used to handle before breakfast.
This whole song and dance about a "self-managed package registry" is just hilarious. It's a local repository. We had this. It was called a filing cabinet full of labeled floppy disks. You wanted the new version of the payroll reconciliation module? You walked to the cabinet, you found the disk, and you loaded it. You didn't need a Docker container running a mock-internet just so your precious little "agent" wouldn't have a panic attack because it couldn't ping its mothership.
And the terminology! "Fleet." "Agents." "Elastic." You sound like you're running a spy agency, not a logging utility. Back in the day, we had programs. They were written in COBOL. They ran, they processed data from a VSAM file, and they stopped. They didn't need to be "enrolled" or "managed by a fleet." They were managed by a 300-page printout and a stern-looking operator named Gladys who could kill a job with a single keystroke. This wasn't "observability," it was just... knowing what your system was doing.
The fundamental flaw here is building a distributed, cloud-native system that is so brittle it requires a special life-support system to function offline.
The Elastic Agent downloads all required content from the Elastic Package Registry... This presents a problem for hosts that are in air-gapped environments. You don't say? It's like inventing a fish that needs a special backpack to breathe underwater. The solution isn't a better backpack; it's remembering that fish are supposed to have gills. We built systems on DB2 on the mainframe that were born in an air-gap. They never knew anything else. They were stable, secure, and didn't need a "registry" to remember what to do.
Frankly, this whole process is just a digital pantomime of what we used to do with punch cards. You create your "package" on one machine (the keypunch), you transfer it physically (carry the card deck), and you load it into the disconnected machine (the card reader). The only difference is that if you dropped our punch card deck, your entire production run was ruined. If your YAML file has an extra space, your entire "fleet" refuses to boot. See? Progress.
Honestly, the more things change, the more they stay the same, just with more steps and fancier names dreamed up by some slick-haired marketing VP. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a CICS transaction to go debug on my 3270 emulator. At least there, the only "cloud" I have to worry about is the one coming from the overheated power supply. Sigh.