Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 433 posts

Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#1

Post by picozeta »

Arguable the goals of DevOps align partly with the goals of system administrators in former days: Provide reliable compute infrastructure for

  1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD
  2) external users: end users
Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized).

The platform of choice is mostly Kubernetes these days, which promises among other things stuff like

  - load balancing
  - self-healing
  - rollbacks/rollouts
  - config management
Before the cloud days, this stuff has been implemented using a conglomerate of different software and shell scripts, issued at dedicated "pet" servers.

In particular, a main critic is "state" and the possibility to change that state by e.g. messing with config files via SSH, which makes running and maintaining these servers more error-prone.

However, my main question is:

"If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes reduce the workload and need less men power?"

Don't get me wrong, the old way does indeed look messy, I am just wondering why there is a need for so much dev ops nowadays ...

Thanks for your answers.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#3

Post by viraptor »

It sure does reduce the amount of work. But there's a lot that remains or just gets shifted to another area/technology. Who's setting up the image build pipeline? Who's handling the scaling and capacity planning? Who's planning how the deployments actually happen? Who's setting up the system for monitoring everything? And tonnes of other things...

Kubernetes helps with: networking setup, consistent deployments, task distribution. That's about it. It's more standardised than plain VMs, but you still have to deal with the other 90% of work.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#4

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

> "If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes reduce the workload and need less men power?"

Because we're living in the stone age of DevOps. Feedback cycles take ages, languages are not typed and error prone, pipelines cannot be tested locally, and the field is evolving rapidly like FE javascript did for many years. Also I have a suspicion that the mindset of the average DevOps person has some resistance to actually using code, instead of yaml monstrosities.

There is light at the tunnel though:

- Pulumi (Terraform but with Code)

- dagger.io (modern CI/CD pipelines)

Or maybe the future is something like ReplIt, where you don't have to care about any of that stuff (AWS Lambdas suck btw).

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#5

Post by majewsky »

In my opinion, the main benefit of Kubernetes for large companies is that it allows for a cleaner separation of roles. It's easier to have a network team that's fully separate from a storage team that's fully separate from a compute team that's fully separate from an application development team because they all work around the API boundaries that Kubernetes defines.

That's valuable because, on the scale of large companies, it's much easier to hire "a network expert" or "a storage expert" or even "a Gatekeeper policy writing expert" than to hire a jack of all trades that can do all of these things reasonably well.

The corollary from this observation is that Kubernetes makes much less sense when you're operating at a start-up scale where you need jacks of all trades anyway. If you have a team of, say, 5 people doing everything from OS level to database to web application at once, you won't gain much from the abstractions that Kubernetes introduces, and the little that you gain will probably be outweighed by the cost of the complexities that lurk behind these abstractions.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#6

Post by jmillikin » 

  >   1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD
  >   2) external users: end users
  >
  > Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do
  > 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just
  > got more specialized).
Both are called sysadmins.

SRE is a specialized software engineering role -- you'd hire SREs if you wanted to create something like Kubernetes in-house, or do extensive customization of an existing solution. If you hire an SRE to do sysadmin work, they'll be bored and you'll be drastically overpaying.

DevOps is the idea that there shouldn't be separate "dev" and "ops" organizations, but instead that operational load of running in-house software should be borne primarily by the developers of that software. DevOps can be considered in the same category as Scrum or Agile, a way of organizing the distribution and prioritization of tasks between members of an engineering org.

---

With this in mind, the question could be reframed as: if projects such as Kubernetes are changing the nature of sysadmin work, why has that caused more sysadmin jobs to exist?

I think a general answer is that it's reduced the cost associated with running distributed software, so there are more niches where hiring someone to babysit a few hundred VMs is profitable compared to a team of mainframe operators.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#9

Post by mfer »

A few thoughts...

1) Kubernetes is an infra platform for the ops in DevOps. If developers need to spend a lot of time doing Kubernetes it takes away from their ability/time to do their dev. So, there are a lot of platform teams who pull together tools to simplify the experience for devs or DevOps specialists who handle operating the workloads.

2) Kuberentes is, as Kelsey Hightower puts it, a platform to build platforms. You need DevOps/SREs to do that.

3) Kubernetes is hard. The API is huge and it's complex. The docs are limited.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#10

Post by etruong42 »

jmillikin wrote: post #6

> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD > 2) external users: end users > > Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do > 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just > got more specialized). Both are called sysadmins. SRE is a specialized software engineering role -- you'd hire SREs if you wanted to create something like Kubernetes in-house, or do extensive customiza…

> so there are more niches where hiring someone to babysit a few hundred VMs is profitable

This makes a lot of sense. The same thing happened in the past with new technology, such as the electronic spreadsheet:

"since 1980, right around the time the electronic spreadsheet came out, 400,000 bookkeeping and accounting clerk jobs have gone away. But 600,000 accounting jobs have been added."

Episode 606: Spreadsheets!, May 17, 2017, Planet Money

Post reply on HN