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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#91

Post by Jorchime »

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…

I think it is because of what is described through Conway's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

    Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.[2][3]
    — Melvin E. Conway
The problem isn't necessarily software itself, but how we organize people (more than 2 or 3), how we communicate, how we mirror operations, expectations, etc. in software.

Scaling sustainable software feels like an "unsolved" Problem, because the society hasn't figured out how to organize better.

Re: DevOps is broken

#92

Post by thundergolfer »

ndneighbor wrote: post #50

I had a very weird sensation while reading this where I was shaking my head disapprovingly at this article. Specifically when they were talking about the commoditization of DevOps. Speaking personally, I used to work on a Platform Engineering team for a major multinational that rhymes with ay-do-bay. And their requirements for the workloads that we needed to be built and hosted where very unique because you have team…

It seems like “rhymes with ba-do-bay” is meant to be obvious but I have no idea what company that is

Re: DevOps is broken

#93

Post by Spivak »

roboben wrote: post #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.

And I know it's somewhat exaggerated but if the product people don't have visibility into your wins as an ops person then you need to make a more conscious effort to talk about them.

Once you peel away the jargon, and tbf doing this is a skill that requires practice, non-techies do think ops work is cool.

Re: DevOps is broken

#94

Post by brightball »

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 extent of devops for your developers should be:

1. Push code to an automated pipeline

2. I understand that the automated pipeline may need input from me in order to run successfully.

Beyond that, you need other people building the "platform" that they're deploying to (for the most part). Probably the ideal example here is Heroku.

Your devs shouldn't be required to do all of the actual ops stuff. They need access to an ops platform.

Re: DevOps is broken

#95

Post by insane_dreamer »

I think of DevOps as "deploying and maintaining infrastructure on which applications run", vs SW Engs as "building applications". Not sure if that's the "accepted" definition or not, but works for us. YMMV.

Re: DevOps is broken

#97

Post by makestuff »

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?

Well I didn't have to get an education to do that and if I mess up washing the dishes I didn't cause a death in the case of a doctor or a multi million dollar outage in tech.

Re: DevOps is broken

#98

Post by ndneighbor »

thundergolfer wrote: post #92
ndneighbor wrote: post #50

I had a very weird sensation while reading this where I was shaking my head disapprovingly at this article. Specifically when they were talking about the commoditization of DevOps. Speaking personally, I used to work on a Platform Engineering team for a major multinational that rhymes with ay-do-bay. And their requirements for the workloads that we needed to be built and hosted where very unique because you have team…

It seems like “rhymes with ba-do-bay” is meant to be obvious but I have no idea what company that is

adobe, but I live my life in perpetual fear of lawyers. Fun times back then.

Re: DevOps is broken

#99

Post by scarface74 »

Test0129 wrote: post #14
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…

Alan Kay said that “Everyone who is serious about software should make their own hardware.” How can you be a good developer if you don’t understand the architectural limitations and choices?

When I design a backend system, I need to think about how the front end developers are going to interact with it. My data storage characteristics and scaling. I need to know am I designing anything that’s hard to deploy. How will logging work and be aggregated. I have to be able to think about the entire system.

It’s not just “cost cutting” at a certain point in your career you are expected to know more than just “how to code”. I’m not saying learn AWS. But I would expect any senior developer to know about what their code runs on top of .

Re: DevOps is broken

#100

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

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…

The complexity of what we are building keeps expanding. Theres no large conspiracy. We have a lot of tooling to build things that were near impossible to build in the past.
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