I have a whole lightning talk about this, called "Why Software Sucks". The premise is that we are always dealing with the boundary between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Adding more stability, more features, etc just changes where that boundary is. After 25+ years in this industry, it sucks as bad as it ever did. Except now instead of a buggy OS, I'm dealing with, say, bugs in Openshift. Something like Openshift was almost unimaginable back when I started. Kinda sucks now.
And the improvements are less than you might think. On that same job, we were managing a couple dozen servers in two different data centers, and 200+ client machines, all remotely, able to deploy different versions of the software to specific machines. It was like "cloud", except we did it all without so much as ssh. We had a configuration management database in Sybase, and rsh/perl scripts, along with SMIT commands (I miss SMIT).
And the improvements are less than you might think. On that same job, we were managing a couple dozen servers in two different data centers, and 200+ client machines, all remotely, able to deploy different versions of the software to specific machines. It was like "cloud", except we did it all without so much as ssh. We had a configuration management database in Sybase, and rsh/perl scripts, along with SMIT commands (I miss SMIT).