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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

81–90 of 363 posts

Re: DevOps is broken

#81
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…

DevOps to me is all about bridging what used to be a huge gap between operations and development. Developers need to know top 10 OWASP. One cannot simply say "it works locally". Ops people need to understand how your tools and programs work at a high level at minimum.

These two talks will change your view on DevOps forever:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwSNjVTF168

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyvgFDh-kw

Re: DevOps is broken

#82
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…

Agreed; I have always thought of it as a rationalization of bad practices.

Re: DevOps is broken

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It just doesn't work for the most part. Maybe as an Ops person, I just want to do Ops, I don't want to have to understand your code, but Lambda has specific limitations on how long code can run for. I can't allocate CPU and Memory resources in Kubernetes without a deep understanding of the application. S3 has limitations on how files can be distributed and accessed. Integrating with CI gets complicated quickly and re…

I think you make a strong case for ops who can dev, but a fairly weak one for devs who can ops so I think you and the parent are actually agreeing. And this mirrors my experience pretty well, I need to know the code to be able to ops effectively but it's much rarer that devs need to know how to ops to dev effectively.

And in some ways this is by design, I want to have some distance between dev and ops because it gives me the freedom to rearrange infrastructure transparently. I can move workloads between Lambda, ECS, and EC2 based on the observed performance characteristics without anyone being the wiser.

Re: DevOps is broken

#84
>platform engineering and enabling developer self-service.

in any sufficiently large company platforms arent engineered, they are acquired or purchased/licensed based on their viability as an "enterprise grade" asset that drives business success and reduces cost through identifiable if not meaningless KPI and record keeping.

In any sufficiently large company self-service is supplanted by rigid controls, authorizations, approvals, and annual reviews. this is done in the service of jira and the need to make-pretend work by an ever growing cavalcade of pseudoworkers who recognize self-service as the killing stroke of their career.

it can then be said, grudgingly and with scorn, that devops seems designed by its very definition to operate as an antipattern to some of the worlds largest, most successful corporations.

Re: DevOps is broken

#85
The problem is that devs simply can't accept that ops exist.

We spoiled devs way too much.

Software are still being thrown over the wall and ops takes all the blame.

The problem is that many devs can get away with spawning servers and doing the easy parts of ops, when it requires rules and discipline, then we all know what happens, over engineering and security holes.

Re: DevOps is broken

#86

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…

I completely agree that 20+ years of cheap money have absolutely caused much of the complexity we see today. That's because people aren't working on problems that matter; instead, they're just trying to make VCs rich--effectively passing the buck on to the greater fool. I think this era is coming to an end, and we should see a drastic reduction in software development costs with the end of cheap debt.

Re: DevOps is broken

#87

> 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's a context-switch. It's a huge, unavoidable context-switch squarely in the middle of your workflow. And those are a recipe for disaster: https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/context-switching-cos...

Re: DevOps is broken

#88
post #55

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…

Because you have, in 90 (99?) percent of instances a smart person (probably IQ 120+) doing a stupid menial job that requires a level of competence that only someone smart can provide. So to prevent themselves from ending it all, they invent things to do to keep themselves sane while they churn out CRUD apps all day long for decades. Sometimes you get truly amazing software, but most of the times it's just reinventing…

> So to prevent themselves from ending it all, they invent things to do to keep themselves sane while they churn out CRUD apps all day long for decades

Or they spend the spare time bullshitting on web forums.

Re: DevOps is broken

#89
Re-posting a comment I made in a different thread, because I think the friction in devops is primarily a socio-cultural issue whose origins lie outside of tech orgs.

===

A colleague of mine once shared his lay sociological theory about dev vs ops, and if taken for what it is -- an essentialization -- it's an interesting perspective. The idea is that ops people have inherited a blue-collar culture, whereas devs have inherited an office-worker/academic culture.

Ops people conceive of their work as fundamentally operational: progress is measured in terms of actions taken, and while automation is greatly valued, there is nothing inherently "messy" with one-off fixes; the objective is to get things working now. The pathological case for this mindset is that of constantly being on the back-foot, responding to incidents with one-off fixes without recognizing that many of them share a common cause that could be addressed.

Dev people conceive of their work as fundamentally intellectual: progress is attained when the problem is correctly conceived, at which point the solution follows naturally. While writing code is greatly valued, most effort should be spent understanding the problem; the objective is to solve it correctly, once and for all. The pathological case for this mindset is that of over-engineering by an ivory-tower idealist, disconnected from the messiness of real-world praxis.

In nearly all orgs I've seen, the proportion of first-generation college grads is greater in ops teams than in dev teams. So too is the proportion of people who come from blue-collar families, or are mechanically inclined (ex: look around and see who tinkers with cars). Likewise, the proportion of people holding graduate degrees is greater in the dev crowd (ex: look around and see who's into math).

It should hopefully be clear that neither is superior to the other. The point is rather that the divide between dev and ops is partly sociological, which means it is largely based on values. Ops will tend to over-value "honest hard work" and dev will tend to over-value "clear articulate thought". There is also some latent, historical tension between these sociological groups, which has a funny way of masquerading as a technical problem. It is helpful to view arguments about "just ship it" vs "design it the right way" through this lens.

Far from being a cute "just so" story, it's been my experience that this dynamic is very important for two reasons: (1) it's harder than you might expect to foster the sense of common destiny required for real "devops"-style collaboration, and (2) each side of the dev-ops divide has a lot to gain from learning when the other side's mindset is helpful, and how to cultivate it in themselves.

Re: DevOps is broken

#90
I don't understand why we can't take more ownership of our work. Even if you are not immediately and directly compensated for every inch that you go above and beyond, you are still in a position to make yourself irreplaceable in terms the business cannot ignore.

Think about the long play. You join a startup with a broken, hot-potato-style "devops" process. Instead of saying "not my problem" all day, you can take some ownership of the items slightly outside your space and try to arrive at a better solution. If you do this often enough and with enough persistence, the end customer will eventually see benefit. At some point, management will likely notice the correlation as well. Even if they don't, you have gained far more experience than you would have otherwise and can maybe go start your own damn company, realizing up to 100% of the value of your labor.

This is why I try hard, even if someone doesn't make me.

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