DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#1

Post by emcooke » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 4:01 PM UTC

Here a brief intro for those that aren't familiar with DevOps: http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/

Before being introduced to the concept of DevOps, we at Twilio struggled with what to call the role. It requires a different kind of thinking. To us, DevOps is about automation to improve productivity, reduce risk, and achieve scale. DevOps engineers should always be striving to deprecate themselves. It has been more then 2 year since we founded Twilio and we've never had a sysadmin or an ops person. This has forced us to write better software automation from day one. However, having someone that can provide leadership on DevOps issues (and fundamentally understands distributed systems/CAP/etc) to the whole team is extremely valuable.

Configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet are the beginning but a more complete view of infrastructure and service automation (e.g., http://redeyemon.sourceforge.net/) seems inevitable in the long term.

We are looking to hire a Lead DevOps engineer. Here is the detailed job description if you know someone that might be interested: http://twilio.jobscore.com/jobs/twilio/devops-engineer/bSHjYWq2Sr37U6eJe4aGWH

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#2

Post by fragmede » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 5:07 PM UTC

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing...

Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#3

Post by WestCoastJustin » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

Whenever I hear that term I cringe a little. I think this was a word invented by developers (please correct me if I'm wrong) to bring sysadmins into the fold. It is definitely good to have an understanding of the application layer but developers also need to understand the systems running their applications.

I work in a large organization (5000+ employees) as a unix/linux sysadmin. You have to automate deployment, monitoring, configuration management because there just isn't time to do anything else. We have a group (about 4) out of 30+ that have an overall view of what you might call devops. The rest specilize in development or sysadmins. We meet once a week and review all progress on the dev/ops issues.

I like the term OpSec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security) someone who looks after Systems/Security ;) Since a good system admin should also know a great deal about security. Maybe Dev/Op/Sec.. haha, but really ;)

p.s. I found that job posting to be full of PR fluff. It would be nice to see job posting actually post what their looking for in a distilled form.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#4

Post by openfly » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 5:45 PM UTC

Sounds like regular Operations work to me. I don't understand why it needs to be differentiated.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#5

Post by emcooke » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:00 PM UTC

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #3

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

Whenever I hear that term I cringe a little. I think this was a word invented by developers (please correct me if I'm wrong) to bring sysadmins into the fold. It is definitely good to have an understanding of the application layer but developers also need to understand the systems running their applications. I work in a large organization (5000+ employees) as a unix/linux sysadmin. You have to automate deployment, mo…

Thanks for the pointer to OpSec term. DevOpsSec... I sense a tshirt in the making?

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#6

Post by lil_cain » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:10 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

Devops may be what a good sysadmin does. I'm not sure that job is. Looks far more like they're looking for a developer to write sysadmin tools.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#7

Post by WestCoastJustin » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:16 PM UTC

emcooke wrote: post #5

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I hear that term I cringe a little. I think this was a word invented by developers (please correct me if I'm wrong) to bring sysadmins into the fold. It is definitely good to have an understanding of the application layer but developers also need to understand the systems running their applications. I work in a large organization (5000+ employees) as a unix/linux sysadmin. You have to automate deployment, mo…

Thanks for the pointer to OpSec term. DevOpsSec... I sense a tshirt in the making?

I first heard about OpSec from Roland Dobbins with Arbor. Really smart fellow who has many suggestions on network design / defence.

I just think people need to specialize in their field (+ a general knowledge of how the overall systems works).

Almost how a carpenter, plumber, and electrician each specialize but probably have a general idea how everything works. Do you really want a plumber building the foundation of your house? Just seems a little silly to me. Each domain is so large that I would rather have deep expert knowledge in a area than a general handyman who might cut corners or waste time with solutions he doesn't know about.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#8

Post by generalk » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:23 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

I expect developers and sysadmins to work together on these things. I'm always confused when they don't, and saddened when people think that's okay.

For instance: I wanted to do a few projects in Rails. I made sure that my admins had links, guides, and all the info they needed when I started the project. By the time I was ready to launch, they'd already had Ruby, Passenger, and all my dependent gems installed. Deploy was a breeze.

Later, a different coworker did a project in Django, but didn't breathe a word to our sysadmins. When he and the client agreed that it was launch time, our admins were scrambling to figure out what version of Python we needed, how to set up the environment, and what the deployment best practices were. Everyone was angry and the deploy was late, but the developer didn't see any consequences.

Kills me.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#9

Post by blueben » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:39 PM UTC

lil_cain wrote: post #6

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

Devops may be what a good sysadmin does. I'm not sure that job is. Looks far more like they're looking for a developer to write sysadmin tools.

This is exactly true. Not to mention "DevOps" is not a job position, it's a culture and philosophy. In the past few months as DevOps has taken off, people listing for "DevOps" job titles usually mean highly proficient sysadmins. In this case, Twilio just wants a developer with a cloud management background. There's nothing DevOpsy about it.

I'm sad that people are not taking the time to learn exactly what DevOps means and thusly commandeering the name for whatever they think they need.

Re: DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation?

#10

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 27, 2010, 6:44 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #2

Linky - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing... Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

[deleted]