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DevOps is broken
61–70 of 363 posts
Re: DevOps is broken
#62There must be some a rite of passage or initiation ritual that I haven't been good enough for yet where you need to write an opinion piece about the term DevOps, because otherwise I'm not sure why in 2022 we're still having to read these articles. Whoever wrote the first one has trolled an entire generation of engineers.
Because, like Agile, it was seized on as a label for "whatever reorg I want to introduce in my three year term at this company before I leave for the next one".
Re: DevOps is broken
#63DevOps is outdated; in fact, most stuff nowadays in engineering is starting to get outdated due to how fast technology is evolving
It also seems like we cycle through ideas, so what was outdated a few years ago becomes interesting again due to a new perspective on modern technology as well as new developers entering unfamiliar spaces.
Re: DevOps is broken
#64> 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.
> You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs.
Why would someone who wants to build stuff not care about where and how it runs? Operational requirements are the same as any other requirements.
Re: DevOps is broken
#65I like doing "devops"/operations work. Getting a service out the door with well thought out infrastructure, plus observability/alerting/runbooks to be handed off to an Ops/SOC team is a great feeling. Then you work on the next service.
If you don't have some sort of Devops team (yes, the term is too broad) to push back on infrastructure complexity and ensure that logging/metrics/alerting/documentation is done, developers just won't do it.
Re: DevOps is broken
#66> 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…
Can't the exact same argument be made for code, though?
"That didn't work, and the traceback (if I read it) isn't very helpful. Guess I'll try something else I found on SO."
You learn ops by doing it, preferably in an environment where when you inevitably do it wrong, it doesn't break prod.
Re: DevOps is broken
#67> 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 happe…
It's because often your software engineers know software development and just enough administration and operations to be dangerous, and your administrators know operations and just enough software development to be dangerous.
Letting them wade into others responsibilities often introduces a lot of that danger.
System administration is an entire discipline with a history and way of thinking and approaching problems at a systems level. Software engineering is the same, but with an approach that often emphasizes handling problems in the application.
Letting solutions be put into applications that are best handled at the system level (where system isn't just an OS, but might be a complex network of them), or put into the system when it could easily be handled by the application, caused inefficiency and problems.
The solution is to either hire only very accomplished people that can do both and make the right decision of where to put solutions, or hire people that can do one or the other and put them together with a few (maybe one) person that has a good grasp of both and can make executive decisions when the right time and place is for specific solutions (an architect).
The latter is easier to hire for.
Re: DevOps is broken
#68I have bewilderingly tried to discern why software development continues to grow more and more complex. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when we talked about languages and OSes and libraries as if they made a difference on how much you could get done with as little people and cognitive load as possible (the claims were very much overrated, but the point was we acted like it mattered). And then it started…
> I have bewilderingly tried to discern why software development continues to grow more and more complex.
It's because of growth, software development today is both simpler and way more complex than before and that's entirely due to growth in the sector. In many ways it's simpler than it ever was, I'm writing an API using Lambda/API Gateway in AWS and it blows me away how quickly I am able to get services stood up and configure my API. But in another way it's so much more complicated, for this same API I spent 2-3 weeks experimenting and researching IAM roles and how all my AWS resources would interact with one another.
I would say the floor of software development has become way simpler, deploying a site to Netlify is way easier than dealing with webservers of the past. But while the floor is lower than ever before, the ceiling is in the stratosphere, with extremely complex systems that you can string together in the "Public Cloud".
Re: DevOps is broken
#69I’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…
You hire those engineers and then you have them implement and support Continuous Delivery for your business, yes? DevOps is a silly term, but one that companies seem to use for "infrastructure engineers who help us continuously deliver value to our customers, efficiently and pain-free". Give your people whatever title you feel comfortable with - but essentially they are "doing the DevOps". :P
Re: DevOps is broken
#70> When was the last time you saw a product manager high-five the ops person and say, ‘fast fucking autoscaler!’?
That's me. I did that.