Ubuntu has included the Eucapyptus project in the aptly named Karmic Koala release 9.10 project in order for mere mortals to be able to install and manage their own cloud. Considering that some important people recommend keeping your data on your own hardware to avoid vendor lock-in and privacy issues, this allows companies to avoid the issues while getting some of the advantages of the cloud. Of course, companies will still need a team, albeit much smaller, of crack infrastructure managers but they will have the advantages provided by the abstraction of hardware and it’s associated management tools.

Besides, what could possibly be cooler than having a compute cloud in your basement data center running on a bunch of cheap PC servers? I’m sure nothing can quite compare.

For those that might not be a *nix sysadmin, you’re missing the joy of firing off scripts from the command line that can do an extraordinary amount of work in a short amount of time. I was a veritable hero early in my career when I was able to help a client replace a copyright string in some 5000 files and create backups with this one:

find . -type f -name '*.html' | xargs grep -l '©' | xargs perl -pi.bak -e 's/©1997/©1999/g'

Or something like that.

Regardless, the client was amazed and happy that one could work such magic in just a few minutes and the content in the Command Line Fu repository looks chock full of opportunities to amaze folks with your wizardry.