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“Who Should Write the Terraform?”

zwischenzugs.com

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Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#111

Post by bigiain »

cube2222 wrote: post #22

Software Engineer at Spacelift[0] here - a CI/CD specialized for Infra as Code (including Terraform). A pattern we're seeing increasingly commonly are Platform Engineering teams doing the bulk of the work, including all the fundamentals, guidelines, safety railing, and conventions, while Software Engineers only use those, or write their own simple service-specific Terraform Stacks which however extensively use module…

> Platform Engineering teams doing the bulk of the work, including all the fundamentals, guidelines, safety railing, and conventions, while Software Engineers only use those

So, sysadmins and programmers - but with new 2020s vintage titles? (and renumeration...)

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#112

Post by luord »

I've thought for a while that sysadmin, operator, "devops engineer" and sre were all more or less the same job, but always felt like saying it would be silly of me.

In the future, I'll just link to this piece.

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#113

Post by notacop31337 »

I've had some thoughts around this issue more recently after moving from DevOps -> Software Engineering.

I love the idea of cross functional teams, but from what I have seen of the most recent implementation of it that I'm working in, there are as always, issues of definition around what a cross functional team actually is and should be.

IMO grabbing a bunch of backend SEs and making them handle their own DevOps is a joke of Academy Awards host level proportions. The shit I see as an ex DevOps dude is horrific. The notion that a bunch of people who've never done the role can somehow figure it out without specific training doesn't work, from my experience.

A cross functional team should actually be cross functional, where you have an engineer, whose specialty is the work you intend for them to complete within that team. Otherwise we're just being overburdened with extra shit that we frankly will never get the time to actually complete in a meaningful way, and it just generates more and more technical debt.

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#114

Post by dilyevsky »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #41

> The development team didn’t want to – or couldn’t – do the Ops work Most devs I've spoke to are in this camp they don't want to do any Ops work at all. They want a 9-5 job without evenings are weekends wasted by services failing. No on call rota and all that jazz just writing code that's all.

People used to have same attitude with testing in reality it’s just way better quality and often velocity if folks dont just throw it over the fence.

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#115

Post by syntheticcdo »

malfist wrote: post #7

What a long winded article to say "it depends", I liked the history though. It got me thinking, here at amazon, we deliver "infrastructure as code" using the Cloud Development Kit: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/ We expect engineers (not devops) to define their infrastructure in typescript and configure it through code. That code gets turned into cloudformation scripts and stands up the how cloud system for the api you'r…

The Amazon CDK is a breath of fresh air and I love working with it, coming from a CloudFormation background. For myself, I can just `cdk synth` and take a peek at the output to conclude "yes, that's what I would have written and the TypeScript saved me hours of reading CF documentation".

However, for others on my team coming in without the CF background, it feels a little like voodoo and as soon as they tread off the "standard path" I find myself getting pulled in to do the "hard stuff".

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#116

Post by jprd »

Halan wrote: post #78
devoutsalsa wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A: “Our Terraform is so bloated it’s starting to rot!” B: “Hashicorpse strikes again.”

Everything should be in code, I feel for sys admins but they had all the time to become software professionals. No more mercy

Yikes!

I presume this self-assured statement comes from ignorance and youth? Can you detail the sysadmins that you've worked with that didn't understand code or the underlying infrastructure they are tasked with supporting better than you or your team?

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#117

Post by theamk »

aranelsurion wrote: post #70
theamk wrote: post #15

Re this segment: > "There were endless complaints about the time taken to get ‘central IT’ to do their bidding, and frequent demands for more autonomy and freedom. A cloud project was initiated by the centralised DBA team to enable that autonomy. [...] Cue howls of despair from the development teams that they need a centralised DBA service" Author makes it sound like users didn't know what they wanted. This is not tr…

> _it was a different set of people_ who were complaining before and after. That's something I've observed as well. Seems to me there are (at least) two developer personas, one kind only wants to deliver their task, specialize in what they do well, and generally can't care less if their DB is oversized or has no maintenance windows set or no recovery plans or who has access to it etc. They usually lack the cloud/plat…

For the second group, I don't think it is about inventing things anew.. most of the time, it's just an efficient way to get things done.

A lot of time the centralized ops team is very slow or just not very good. Your tickets may take weeks to be processed, or critical requirements are ignored, or maybe central ops team only cares about closing tickets and does minimal possible work to satisfy the letter of the requirement.

If there is no one on your team who can do better.. well you suffer and work with central team. But if your team has someone who can do this and the autonomy to proceed, then your can work much faster -- no need to wait weeks for to allow the other team to access your data, you can grant the permission yourself in under a day.

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#118

Post by NateEag »

bigiain wrote: post #111
cube2222 wrote: post #22

Software Engineer at Spacelift[0] here - a CI/CD specialized for Infra as Code (including Terraform). A pattern we're seeing increasingly commonly are Platform Engineering teams doing the bulk of the work, including all the fundamentals, guidelines, safety railing, and conventions, while Software Engineers only use those, or write their own simple service-specific Terraform Stacks which however extensively use module…

> Platform Engineering teams doing the bulk of the work, including all the fundamentals, guidelines, safety railing, and conventions, while Software Engineers only use those So, sysadmins and programmers - but with new 2020s vintage titles? (and renumeration...)

Basically, yeah, but with the difference that these sysadmins are generalizing and abstracting the patterns they've learned over years.

I personally think of "devops" not quite so much as being about "dev" and "ops" collaborating (though that is a noble and worthwhile goal) as about having "developer-operators", people who know how to do operations effectively and who can turn that knowledge into automated, generalized software systems.

The abstract modules and tools can live in their own repositories (or folders, in a monorepo), and your devoperators can work closely with the product teams to use them (and abstract specific changes to meet projects' individual needs to be more generally applicable).

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#119

Post by chii »

cube2222 wrote: post #52
zwischenzug wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: yup Pendulum back to the center

Partly yes, but not fully. The idea is not to go back to the Software Engineer asking the Ops team "Hey, can you provision a Postgres database for me please?" and then waiting a week for it. It's that the Software Engineer takes a module that was prepared by the Platform team - i.e. "terraform-postgres-mycompany" - which already includes all the requirements the company has for handling databases (think backups, moni…

> They can then proceed to use it in the small service-specific Terraform configuration, which really is just putting such ready-made modules together.

now, a new requirement comes in for the product team(s) - a new service which bulk reads/processes another team's data (e.g., an export service).

Turns out this is too slow if the bulk reads use the usual web api route. So direct access to another team's provisioned database is required.

This now falls onto the platform team to produce a method for doing so.

Imagine this, but multiplied by N, where N is the number of different features being worked on at the same time, and all of them needs time from the platform team to produce something new for them!

Re: “Who Should Write the Terraform?”

#120

Post by chii »

solatic wrote: post #94

ITT people arguing for embedding infrastructure engineers into product teams. Ayyyy, dios mio. a) If you need to embed, then actually, you need to embed InfoSec, UX, IT, Customer Success, Product, Compliance, etc. etc. for exactly the same reasons. In today's labor-constrained economy, good luck finding qualified people for every role on every team! And if one of them leaves, who ensured that they documented everythi…

> you need to embed InfoSec, UX, IT, Customer Success, Product, Compliance, etc. etc. for exactly the same reasons

aka, a full-stack engineer! The idea that you have some specialist take care of each role in a team is just fantasy.

Get a smart person, and train them full-stack. Including customer success (aka, sales and after-sales support), compliance (i mean, GDPR is required understanding now, so might as well be the engineer who knows it).

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