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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#71

Post by wruza »

hbarka wrote: post #25
makestuff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

She doesn't impose multiple business-critical schedules on that, so you can just wash them, pick your nose for a while, take out the garbage and go play games. There is nothing wrong with doing related jobs solo when situation allows, but this example is also far from learning and using "modern" full-stack of stacks or doing surgeries.

Re: DevOps is broken

#72

Post by dilyevsky »

travisgriggs wrote: post #34

I 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…

SaaS model requires software to be always online (strict sla) and you need to be able to update it without downtime or very little downtime. That’s the reason. For example, telecom software that always had these requirements was always complex

Re: DevOps is broken

#73

Post by jesuscript »

travisgriggs wrote: post #34

I 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…

Your guess is as good as anyones at this point. There’s just many over corrections that resemble strong levels of grandstanding. React is complex? Okay, let’s ditch JavaScript and just do basic server rendered pages.

It’s a laughable over reaction (pun unavoidable).

These are manic states the dev community enters, and all pragmatism is lost in our discourse on the solution.

Cooler heads are not prevailing. There is certainly a solution in the middle.

Devops is bullshit is also an over correction. It’s worth saying that making infra more accessible is a democratization of that entire sub-field. How do we preserve the good part of that?

Re: DevOps is broken

#74

Post by CraigJPerry »

Hard disagree but Mandy Rice-Davies applies.

Some interpretation of DevOps may be BS, e.g.

>> Need a database? File a ticket with DevOps.

That does seem like a bit short of the mark. E.g. that should be automated provisioning in 2018, never mind in 2022.

Counter points as to why DevOps is not BS:

Today there's just an acceptance that you version your code in VCS, it wasn't always that way. "Hey, this doesn't look right, i know you said you based your change on gui-app.latest-final2.zip but was that Steve or Laura's version of latest-final2?". If you didn't work through this period you'll struggle to believe how common it was for shipping products not to be fully up to date in VCS or not to have VCS at all. DevOps changed this.

Continuous integration? No there were people hired as "merge masters" or "build managers", i promise i am not making this up. DevOps changed this, the idea that you wouldn't do at least CI or perhaps CD is unexpected today.

Deployment automation? Sure, you email it to the ops team, send a few more emails with attachments late on Friday with ammendments and hope that they deploy the right one. Automated deployment as far as the developer was concerned. The ops person on the other end? Sure they had a batman's belt full of hand crafted tools and scripts but it was definitely pets not the cattle DevOps has made us strive for.

Testing automation? The testers sit on level 3 not next to dev on level 4, there's about 4 banks of desks over by the cupboards, that's all the testers. They have lotus notes databases with checkboxes to confirm when they test something. If they find an issue a regression report will arrive with the dev team in under a week.

I could go on an on. Platform teams are great when used correctly. You can say something similar about DevOps.

Re: DevOps is broken

#75

Post by NikolaNovak »

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…

>>the only alternative is to start making CPUs by hand

Agreed. For some applications the cloud difference is significant; for many (most?) others though, "Cloud" is just rebrand of "Hosted". And even for more cloudy offerings, while I'm in a very specific and different part of IBM, some of the old timers/architects/powers-that-be keep trying to explain "We had that in 1969!!!" :-D

Agreed also at rewriting of history when it comes to development/support/operations models. My dad has been IT director and he chuckles when I talk to him about "new and exciting paradigms" which he of course sees as turning a circle to what they had in 70's and 80's :)

Re: DevOps is broken

#76

Post by g051051 »

Lutger wrote: post #31

DevOps is bullshit in the same way that Agile is bullshit. So, it's actually not at all, but just has become so fashionable that the term is sufficiently abused to become almost useless.

100% agreement. Agile and devops have done more to wreck software development than anything I've seen in more than 30 years in the industry.

Re: DevOps is broken

#77

Post by bluedino »

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.

> You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs.

In the old days, developers would also configure the design of the system it ran on.

"Alright, we're going to use some fast CPU front end nodes with smaller, faster disks, and then have a load balancer, our database server is going to have the most RAM, now let's set these resources up on a CDN to serve faster, this memacache server is really going to lighten the load..."

I think the idea was to use tools that automatically did all this work for you, but it just ended up creating another tier of people that configure this side of it.

Re: DevOps is broken

#78

Post by charles_f »

giantg2 wrote: post #2

"DevOps Is Bullshit" Wait until you meet DevSecOps...

Oh, yes, the big shift of "everything's the responsibility of devs". Wait till we also need to do product analysis and we finally get to it.

ProAnalDevSecOps

Re: DevOps is broken

#79

Post by bsenftner »

travisgriggs wrote: post #34

I 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…

My theory is we need to add "software history" to computer science education programs. How many developers whose careers began after 2000 have ever hand written or know the power of a Makefile? I've worked at research labs and major animation studios that back in the 90's the entire infrastructure was fully automated thru Makefiles, and it purred like a well fed cat. There are hundreds of thousands of forgotten perfectly fine software tools, ignored simply because our industry has absolutely no respect for it's own history or lessons painfully learned beyond pulling up disparaging stories for new marketing angles.

Re: DevOps is broken

#80

Post by dilyevsky »

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.

Race car driver vs bus driver. Race car driver knows how their car functions and works with engineers/mechanics on improvements. Bus driver don’t give a shit (no offense to bus driver). Decide which company you are - a race team or a bus line
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