Live data from Hacker News

DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

111–120 of 363 posts

Re: DevOps is broken

#111

> 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…

A developer who doesn't have a holistic view on their systems is a liability.

Re: DevOps is broken

#112
How many companies are there where a Dev team writes code and "throws it over the wall" for Ops to deploy and maintain? I hear people talking about this as an anti-pattern all the time, but I haven't been in enough workplaces to see what this looks like when it happens recently.

Re: DevOps is broken

#113

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.

>Theres no large conspiracy

Yes, there is a network of small to medium sized ones.

> things that were near impossible to build in the past.

Were they necessary in the past?

Re: DevOps is broken

#114
Over the last ten years, the market has tried to kill off the hardware, systems, network and security people, and mostly succeeded.

As a result, it's relatively easy to find someone who advertises as "full stack devops" who has never actually operated any infrastructure more complex than a LAMP webserver cluster. And it's hard to find a senior sysadmin who has enough years of experience to understand and troubleshoot all of your infrastructure from layer 0 up. People with that experience have moved into management or consulting or retirement, and there are no jobs for new folks.

Re: DevOps is broken

#115
post #110
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, anytime I talk with someone about DevOps ... we end up having to hash out the entire process to really know what either of us are actually talking about. Otherwise you have these situations "Yea the DevOps guy messed up the widget and nobody notic---" "Wait, what is the DevOps guy doing even touching that widget.... what is even DevOps to you?" "Bro that widget IS DevOps." -silence- Same applies to the topic…

SOA is just Spaghetti Architecture. I haven't seen an implementation that convinces me otherwise.

I feel like it has its place in large organization. But being a large organization means the odds of spaghetti are approaching 100% no matter what you do.

Re: DevOps is broken

#116
post #69
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…

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

Did I get downvoted because I'm right and the truth hurts or is there a disagreement somebody chose to not share? Hmm...

Re: DevOps is broken

#117
PaaS is grate, sure it doesn't fully eliminated oprations but it makes it much easier for you to do what the article described.

Like most things it comes at a cost (for a good PaaS mainly the running cost).

But I increasingly come to believe that for small startups which fundamentally don't have the resources to do what the article describes or anything close to it using PaaS and keeping operational complexity as low as possible is the way to go.

Re: DevOps is broken

#118
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 give…

This is going to depend on a lot of things. Size of company, cloud native or not, org structure. I mean everyone would love to live in the google world where a team of SRE's run everything. But even in the world where a Devops engineer is embedded on a team there's bus factor to consider.

I think most modern AWS services are more the equivalent of an API or a microservice than they are a server, and you need to understand the limitations of the services you integrate with. If you're a cloud native company and don't have a mature platform engineering team, devs are going to have to know alot about AWS.

If the developer has all the information necessary to create an S3 bucket, lambda function, kinesis stream, etc does it make sense for them to offload 10 pieces of information to me, or for them to learn HCL and interact with it themselves, especially if it is something they do often. Especially if there's a central dev/ops team and they're the limiting factor. Devops taking over every infrastructure change for a broad team of devs is inefficient and expensive. It's also probably frustrating for devs that are aware of the above factors. Lots of devs I know would prefer to do it themselves.

And all of this is to mention that infrastructure and integrations with infrastructure are not static. Should I be reviewing all PR's to a system that touch the client code for an AWS service, because the dev team doesn't want to learn how that service works? Maybe, but in the end I don't know if this makes anyone happy.

Platform engineering is certainly the goal. Where ops creates a platform and dev just consumes that platform. But I don't know if it is realistic. Every system on rails is great until you try to take the rails off, and most devs I know hate rails :-) Fundamentally "devops" is all meant to solve human problems, not tech problems so it will have to be dynamic.

Re: DevOps is broken

#119
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…

I agree - I think it it is much better to use titles like these and with even a short JD describing what technology is used (many of which could be "devops" tools for infra engineers) everything becomes much more clear.

Re: DevOps is broken

#120
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…

> I don’t hire devops, I hire infra engineers, build engineers, release engineers and: backend engineers.

This is a great way to do it. There seems to be a correlation between unnecessary product complexity and unnecessary corporate complexity. Being direct about roles goes a long way towards simplifying corporate complexity.

Post reply on HN