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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#11

Post by lucasyvas »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

It is more nuanced. I care, but my skillset demands I spend more time on the Development side, so Operations must take the backseat in my mind because of this incentive structure. Asking one person to do two (actually three) job functions is a scam.

Most developers have to do Frontend, Backend, and Ops. These have wildly different mindsets and feedback loops and not enough time exists. Don't hate the player, hate the game. The orgs are fucked, not the workers.

Re: DevOps is broken

#13

Post by makestuff »

lucasyvas wrote: post #11
counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

It is more nuanced. I care, but my skillset demands I spend more time on the Development side, so Operations must take the backseat in my mind because of this incentive structure. Asking one person to do two (actually three) job functions is a scam. Most developers have to do Frontend, Backend, and Ops. These have wildly different mindsets and feedback loops and not enough time exists. Don't hate the player, hate the…

It is like your doctor being the anesthesiologist, the recovery room nurse, and the surgeon all at once.

Re: DevOps is broken

#14

Post by Test0129 »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

I don't understand. I want to develop code. I don't want to become an AWS/S3/Github/Jenkins/Action/terraform/etc expert. I know enough of this to be dangerous but not at a level that passes as professional. Yet I am regularly tasked with maintaining the full deployment of code.

There's a reason to have a team of people doing this "DevOps" work. Just like we have a team of people who do SRE. It creates a standard and a single point which all work flows through. Then you don't wander onto a new project only to realize they use $BESPOKE_DEPLOYMENT_METHOD because "it's what we used 6 months ago". Or worse, you don't have a developer playing with a massive, nuclear powered, foot gun like Terraform and accidentally destroying infrastructure.

Making DevOps/DevSecOps/$BUZZWORD the responsibility of developers is a cost-cutting measure not a responsibility measure.

Re: DevOps is broken

#15

Post by williamcotton »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

Well what about Google Sheets? Lots of people are able to build things in Google Sheets without knowing where and how it runs.

Perhaps most of our organizations are using the wrong tools and that the way we divide responsibilities is the problem.

Imagine if:

1.) instead of general purpose languages being used by product developers we had domain-specific languages and tooling that were agnostic to things like deployment, memory-management, data storage

2.) computer engineers built the domain-specific languages and tooling and focused on things like deployment, memory-management and data storage.

DevOps is generally solving for general purpose development while developers are generally solving domain-specific problems with general purpose tools. This seems to be a large part of the disconnect!

Re: DevOps is broken

#16

Post by wry_discontent »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

I totally don't want to do operations work.

I've done some, and it feels like reading an arcane text in another language. I've seen the thing I want before, so I know there exists a magical YAML incantation that brings it about but I have no idea how to even start looking for it. It devolves to an extremely slow feedback loop of "did that work? No."

I've never found anything that explained how I'm supposed to create a systematic approach to creating anything I need.

Re: DevOps is broken

#17

Post by dijit »

I’ve long held this opinion but I consistently get drowned out.

DevOps has different meaning depending on who you’re talking to, even some definitions that appear similar are different in nuanced but important ways.

All “devops” as a job title has done has muddy responsibilities and given many folks the wrong impression of what an operations discipline should be.

There is also a lot of rewriting of history that gets thrown in, similar to how when people talk about cloud then the only alternative is to start making CPUs by hand and begin building your own nuclear reactors. It’s the idea of what came before, not the reality, that people seem to be defensive of.

It’s honestly exhausting to discuss.

So instead I became CTO so I can solve this mess properly, I don’t hire devops, I hire infra engineers, build engineers, release engineers and: backend engineers.

Roles so simple that you already have a clue what they do, which is sort of the point of job titles.

Re: DevOps is broken

#18

Post by alexjplant »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

Sometimes the engineers _do_ care about the deployment and operations of their apps and management doesn't let them administer them in production under the guise of "separation of responsibilities" or "regulatory compliance". It makes the ops team unhappy that they're on the hook for stuff they didn't build and the dev team unhappy because they're steering their metaphorical ship by proxy.

I'm not sure why this happens but it does and I don't like it (as somebody who's very M-shaped).

Re: DevOps is broken

#20

Post by justin_oaks »

I'm not sure if having two teams is always going to be better than having one DevOps team, but my experience in having two teams is that it's rare to have the incentives aligned. The author of the post pointed out that dev teams will cut corners and throw broken applications over the wall to ops to deal with.

When ops gets woken up at 2am because someone in dev cut corners, what happens? Does dev feel the pain? Almost never.

The same thing happens when outside contractors develop code. They often provide a buggy and undocumented mess, and then no longer work on the project. They never feel the pain, so they're not incentivized to provide good code.

Until we find ways to align incentives, we're going to keep getting crap whenever more than one team is involved.

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