The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
wolfoliver.medium.com
The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
1–10 of 321 posts
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#2He’s not wrong. Over complicating DevOps does take the control away from developers but I think a lot of the Ops part of DevOps is to create an internal PaaS that your devs can deploy to themselves.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#3Totally agree, I’ve always insisted myself and/or my team are called “infrastructure”[1], who provide the platform for the rest of engineering to deploy stuff to (devops). But when hiring for this team, have always used devops as the title because it brings in the right type of candidates.
[1] platform is probably a better name :)
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#4A sysadmin team leader walks into the room and says, "Everyone, you are now DevOps engineers, carry on", and walks out to collect a bigger paycheck...
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#5He’s not wrong. Over complicating DevOps does take the control away from developers but I think a lot of the Ops part of DevOps is to create an internal PaaS that your devs can deploy to themselves.
Except then it's not DevOps. If you have people working on 'DevOps' 100% of the time, that means they aren't working on Dev, and are only working on Ops.
The idea behind DevOps is that Dev(elopers) do their own Op(eration)s, rather than throwing stuff over the wall for a separate team to manage.
Not only has the industry done the opposite in many cases, they kept the name DevOps, meanwhile the full time operations staff have over complicated deployments and builds to the point that even they don't understand how they work anymore.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#6Can we please get rid of the DevOps hype train?
What gets completely ignored is that there is a reason that sysops has been a specialized role for decades. How often do we get threads here that people get their AWS accounts hijacked because of some credential leak (e.g. access keys in frontend builds), extreme expenses due to stupid autoscaling settings combined with a DoS attack or content leaks out of insecure s3 buckets? Or how much money gets wasted because clueless "devops" developers think that failsafe redundancy for their tiny PHP app is configuring a bunch of x2large instances and putting ELB in front of it instead of either going with lambda functions in the first place or at the very least use small instances and sensible autoscaling.
Or ffs just take gitlab ci pipelines. Nearly every time when taking over a project or hopping in to consult I see utter fucking bullshit written by people who don't have any idea what the fuck they are doing. Yeah, your build takes 10 minutes because you don't use any cache anywhere and you don't use Nexus or any other form of repository cache. And ffs no you should not push your application image to public Dockerhub because you have no idea that Gitlab has its own registry - and no, "I read it on some 'getting started' guide for ' ain't an excuse either. People get barely trained in the technology they use, most JS frameworks (and fwiw, Gitlab and Github CI themselves!) are young enough that it's impossible to get senior people for them, and the stuff that ships for "CI templates" there is atrocious.
The amount of knowledge required to securely operate any kind of hosting or development operation is immense, and acting like developers should also shoulder the role of unix sysadmin, IT security staff and cloud configurations is extremely ignorant - not to mention only half of the developers know more than "ls/cd/rm" on the command line, less if they are Windows developers.
I do see value in "devops" as in "a person primarily focused on operating infrastructure, but with enough capability to troubleshoot production issues in applications", but devops as in "save money for actually qualified ops staff" is irresponsible penny pinching.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#7I've also become a little disillusioned with the 'DevOps means developers create their infra/deploy their applications' mantra too, especially when you see several years of accumulated infrastructure spun up by developers that don't really care about its quality. Then again, having a dedicated ops team can lead to siloing and learned helplessness on the part of devs too. It's a bit cyclic.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#8A sysadmin team leader walks into the room and says, "Everyone, you are now DevOps engineers, carry on", and walks out to collect a bigger paycheck...
So this, but instead of starting with Sysadmins with tens of years of unix experience, start with junior developers with 1 year of experience using Docker as a developer and have them read a blog post on how-to set up Kubernetes.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#9I made a similar ranty blog post about devops.
I was surprised by the amount of history and misconception that exists around the term.
The term was originally intended as “Agile Systems Administration” but came about at the same time as a talk titled 100 deploys a day.
So people conflated the two, and it didn’t help that the conference was a portmaneau of “Developers, Operations days” to encourage it being a conference for everyone. Eitherway. We’re stuck with it now, and it’s the least meaningful job title I’ve ever known.
If you have to ask “what does x mean to you” then it’s a failed descriptor.
Re: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
#10Can we please get rid of the DevOps hype train? What gets completely ignored is that there is a reason that sysops has been a specialized role for decades. How often do we get threads here that people get their AWS accounts hijacked because of some credential leak (e.g. access keys in frontend builds), extreme expenses due to stupid autoscaling settings combined with a DoS attack or content leaks out of insecure s3 b…
Great to see someone else saying this for a change. "Dev" and "Ops" are different skill sets with some potential overlap, but not 100%. Organizations I've been in have never done the "throw it over the wall" thing, either. Dev and Ops are partners, and treating things any other way is a recipe for failure.