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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#21

Post by danielvaughn »

makestuff wrote: post #13
lucasyvas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, yes this is the perfect analogy. I think every developer should have some kind of baseline understanding of devops stuff. But it’s a whole field in and of itself, and is also innovating fairly rapidly.

There are only so many hours in the day, it’s hard enough to stay on top of my core skill set.

Re: DevOps is broken

#22

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #17

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…

[deleted]

Re: DevOps is broken

#23

Post by LaGrange »

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.

Yup. I basically came here to quote the same line answering with "And I don't want to work with them."

Though mind you, the article touches - but doesn't go into - the real reason things go shit. It's not ops, it's not devops, because your knowledge silo can too, and in my experience (that's longer than the writers, lol) _will be_ pressured.

If the estimates are consistently too low (because honest ones would render many - maybe most - projects non-viable), the requirements are often bullshit (because otherwise the lies in the estimate would be too obvious, and everyone needs to agree on the lie) and and rewards are not the ones the jobs claims to be (in every workplace, your job is to improve your resume. That's all. That's the only thing that, materially, matters for your career. I can care about software I write, but if anything I end up punished for it) - then no amount of renaming things and shifting org charts around or motivational reading for managers is going to fix that. Nor will a Cloud or latest orchestration software.

Re: DevOps is broken

#24

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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.

The architecte and the carpenter can be the same person on a small house, but I don't think it should on a big office building.

Re: DevOps is broken

#25

Post by hbarka »

makestuff wrote: post #13
lucasyvas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bad analogy. How about your mom asking you to help wash the dishes and take out the garbage?

Re: DevOps is broken

#26

Post by mjr00 »

> If the “DevOps” team ships a Postgres RDS instance it will run fine forever, that is until an application starts using it. All of a sudden a cascade of N+1s hit, the CPU spikes, and queries grind to a halt. Who is woken up? And why does this always happen at 2 AM? In this scenario, there is nothing for operations personnel to do, yet here they are.

This is definitely a symptom of a broken model and not what I would call devops. IMO the most important tenant of devops is "if you build it, you run it," meaning the appdev team that decided to use Postgres RDS is the one getting woken up at 2am.

It's also, in my experience, one of the best ways to reduce masturbatory engineering decisions and get people to focus on picking boring technology that works. Coding up a serverless application in Rust that's using a CockroachDB backend at a Python/MySQL shop would get a lot of engineers excited, but those people would be less excited knowing they're going to be the ones paged at 2am when this new and exciting architecture falls over in an unfamiliar way (as opposed to Python/MySQL, where a wealth of operational knowledge at the org has already been built up).

Similarly, it naturally reduces architecturally complexity. Younger senior engineers love drawing boxes of queues, multiple microservices, event buses, etc to show off their skill in creating the ultimate engineering fantasy, but once you throw enough late night operational incidents at a senior engineer, suddenly the preferred architecture becomes "an executable running on a box that I can SSH into when things go wrong."

Re: DevOps is broken

#27

Post by ny711 »

DevOps is outdated; in fact, most stuff nowadays in engineering is starting to get outdated due to how fast technology is evolving

Re: DevOps is broken

#28

Post by imaurer »

I feel like I need some definitions to understand this article and discussion. What is dev? What is ops? What is devops? What is system administration? What is sysadmin?

I'm 47 and what is described seems like the old problems that I thought devops solved.

Re: DevOps is broken

#30

Post by cies »

DevOps to me is:

* Infra as code

* Infra code sits in a repo

* Infra code is managed by the (senior) devs

* No separate ops team, or ops role, is needed: it's a responsibility of the devs now.

* Monitoring production: also by the devs -- if an issue arises "we" take turns in solving them as devs.

DevOps is no longer managing your own hardware, but using hardware-behind-an-API in the cloud.

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