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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#131

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

kuramitropolis wrote: post #113
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is like asking whether innovation is necessary. Capitalism pushes us towards it. New forms of efficiency and value are unlocked by moving further out on the software complexity curve. Not everything thats complex works well, but some of it does solve the problem

Re: DevOps is broken

#132

Post by duxup »

sbf501 wrote: post #127
duxup wrote: 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…

"Hey, did the front-end new-hire upgrade the Linux distro yet?"

Side rant:

There was an angry Ask HN post a while back about how terrible the "new guys" are that are out there.

It then complained that the new hire wrote a horrible authentication service.

I thought it was an intentionally absurd post about the expectations put on new some rando new guy to write something important / they shouldn't be working alone on ... but they were serious.

Re: DevOps is broken

#133

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

williamcotton wrote: post #15
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.

Well what about Google Sheets? Lots of people are able to build things in Google Sheets without knowing where and how it runs. Perhaps most of our organizations are using the wrong tools and that the way we divide responsibilities is the problem. Imagine if: 1.) instead of general purpose languages being used by product developers we had domain-specific languages and tooling that were agnostic to things like deployme…

That's an interesting idea. I wonder what constraints led us to the current division of labor, and which ones are artificial.

Re: DevOps is broken

#134

Post by f1shy »

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work.

I was convinced this was exactly what devops wanted to address and solve.

Re: DevOps is broken

#135

Post by dogleash »

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…

>DevOps has different meaning depending on who you’re talking to

1000% this.

I think it's an instance of how the conversation in software always talks about solutions as if they're end-all-be-all answers, rather than explain a problem in specifics and why that made the solution the right answer at the time.

Then that "solution" becomes a buzzword version of itself, and popular buzzwords are tools leaders use to overcome institutional inertia. Which is a good thing, to get over that inertia. But then what comes misses the insight and understanding that eventually turned into a buzzword.

Re: DevOps is broken

#136

Post by mikkergp »

Test0129 wrote: post #52
mikkergp wrote: post #40

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…

At companies I've worked for where they actually do this the DevOps people are generally assigned to a team. So you might have 10 developers on a project, and one guy managing just the devops exactly to solve this problem. In smaller companies/etc I can see where this is a problem. I agree, and there's nothing wrong with knowledge sharing. This could even be as simple as having PR descriptions including benchmarks/co…

> DevOps people are generally assigned to a team

Yeah and this is a great solution (aside from the bus factor), maybe the person I responded to was really concerned less about knowledge and more about expertise (the word they did use in their was expert) At a company I worked with we called this T-shaped engineers. Deep in one thing, but broadly knowledgeable. Devs have to have knowledge of ops, but not "expertise" that is ultimately what ops is for, we may just ultimately be fighting over where the knowledge line is sufficient and what constitutes "expertise" :-). I for instance think terraform is not that much of a footgun and provides good rails to be used by developers.

Re: DevOps is broken

#137

Post by erulabs »

Call the person or the team or the practice whatever you'd like: DevOps is the merger of development and business operations. It is not developer + sysadmin. Companies with no "devops" (people/team/practice) build big sticky balls of mud. If they're lucky, they hit product-market-fit before the mud dries - if not, well, this is why most software companies die and why most large organizations cannot make progress. DevOps simply plots the trajectory of our drying ball of mud, and attempts to keep it moist for as long as possible.

I don't care if I'm by myself, if I have a team, if I have a devops title - all I want is to prevent the existential death-by-garbage-fire that eventually consumes all technology. If you're a developer and you're not aware that you're marching slowly towards a complexity-cliff, that's fine - we just have different jobs. If you're a developer and you're aware commits aren't by default equivalent to progress, congrats, you're an SRE/DevOps/Senior Engineer/Platform/whatever.

Re: DevOps is broken

#138

Post by jahewson »

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 semi-agree but my take is that money can buy you people, it can buy you lines of code, more moving parts, more stuff. But it can’t buy elegance, efficiency and good design - those have to be nurtured. Most engineers nowadays haven’t ever seen a codebase that isn’t a hot mess (no offence folks). The demand for talented and experienced engineers eclipses the available supply. The industry is growing too fast for that. The engineers that really are good are needed in leadership, or become founders.

Re: DevOps is broken

#139

Post by jedberg »

soperj wrote: post #110
duxup wrote: 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.

What is your definition of Spaghetti Architecture? Netflix had a good SOA that enabled rapid development and had strong cut lines between services, with no way to access the data of a service without going through the service's API.

I think that's where most people go wrong. They put a bunch of services in front of a shared database, which means that they don't have to go through a service's API to get to it's data, and that's what breaks everything.

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