DevOps is broken • Hacker News Board

Re: DevOps is broken

#201

Post by bsenftner » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

nathanaldensr wrote: post #86

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 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.

We may see a strange hang over from this period: over the last 20 years we've created tech billionaires and tech trillionaire corporations - both entities that are not used to being told "no" and will spend their own money to extend this party that is their reality. Case in point: FB/Meta and their doomed Metaverse.

Re: DevOps is broken

#202

Post by guhidalg » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #188

vlunkr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps is part of my job description. I was fuzzy on what it meant before, after reading this article, I have no idea what it means. As a general term, it's far too vague, when in practice it seems to just mean that you'll be splitting your time between writing regular application code and writing infrastructure as code. Oh and you get to be on-call.

i'm working on an RFP response that has the word "DevSecOps" sprinkled around here and there. That's an even more subjective and ambiguous term than devops :/

It means you're gonna be doing dev, ops, security, compliance, UX, UI, cost optimization, build, test, release, and on and on... good luck!

Re: DevOps is broken

#203

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #155

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 is part of my job description. I was fuzzy on what it meant before, after reading this article, I have no idea what it means. As a general term, it's far too vague, when in practice it seems to just mean that you'll be splitting your time between writing regular application code and writing infrastructure as code. Oh and you get to be on-call.

[deleted]

Re: DevOps is broken

#204

Post by guhidalg » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

cr4nberry wrote: post #187

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, even some definitions that appear similar are different in nuanced but important ways. This is always a dead giveaway that something is a buzzword Same for rest. Sometimes when people use it, it just means JSON + http requests. Other times it's supposed to be some kind of architectural style

You can always point people to the original paper that defined REST: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc...

Re: DevOps is broken

#205

Post by errantmind » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

Why was the title changed from the original?

Re: DevOps is broken

#206

Post by lumost » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

rovr138 wrote: post #184

lumost wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, every time I see a title split people start saying that's "X's job", you can't do that because it's "y's job", or I don't want to be involved in "Z". Fewer titles can avoid these discussions.

Looks like you already identified the people that should be in those roles. If they're not doing it or was overlooked for some reason, then that's an issue but not really an argument to not do it.

Since when are managers incentivized to put people where their interests align? particularly when there is a perceived role transition.

Re: DevOps is broken

#207

Post by ardfard » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

deepstack wrote: post #185

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sysadmin" got rebranded as "DevOps", because "techsupport" got rebranded as "sysadmin".

glad someone said it. I mean all the CI/CD pipeline are just in the old day *nix/bsd days bash/perl/awk/sed/python/ruby (fill in the blank) scripts. One problem when IT/Software development become more main stream is that everything got another layer of obfuscation especially in corporate cultures and amongst sales and recruiters and managements. Development Operation or pipeline sounds sooo much better bash scripts.

Just bash script isn't enough if there's no automated process that run it every time developers make changes to your main/release repository trunk. If you still run it manually to verify your build, then it's not a CI. If you're still doing manual release deployment, then it's not a CD.

Re: DevOps is broken

#208

Post by gitpusher » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

I'm not sure I agree with author. Sounds like they have worked at shitty places that are using the word "DevOps" but really they are doing things the old way.

My company practices "DevOps" and it feels great:

  - Infra team build self-service tools (build, deploy, scale, observe)
  - Infra team write good documentation for these tools
  - Dev use tools to build, deploy, and monitor their apps
  - Dev not use use words like: AWS, k8, Envoy. These are abstracted by tools.
  - if problem with app (very common) Dev fix it using the tools
  - if problem with tool (very rare) Infra fix it

We have no build engineers, release engineers, etc. However we do have a rotation (similar to on-call) whereby Dev is responsible for releasing code that week.

Sure there are sometimes problems, frustrations, etc. No system is perfect. But you are getting paid lots of $$$ so shush with your whining & instead help improve the system.

For context my company is mid-size ~150 engineers

Re: DevOps is broken

#209

Post by wikibob » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #174

jedberg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

This is really important, and I've gotten a lot of quizzical looks when making this assertion over the years: data is owned by one and only one service. If two pieces of code assert ownership of it by mutating that data or looking past the public encapsulation of that data, then that code is the same service. If you see a queue between two services, that is usually an indication that some ownership is being transferr…

> Data sovereignty per microservice

> An important rule for microservices architecture is that each microservice must own its domain data and logic . Just as a full application owns its logic and data, so must each microservice own its logic and data under an autonomous lifecycle, with independent deployment per microservice.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/micros...

Re: DevOps is broken

#210

Post by mikkergp » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #197

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…

This makes me wonder if ops allocating compute resources is really a good use of time if you're needing precise details of an app (which can and do evolve). This isn't a slam against ops, either, it's a knock against the tech itself that it forces all this incidental complexity on you.

Yeah, I mean, fundamentally it's so complex because you have to make tradeoffs and people hate tradeoffs

"I don't want to have to worry about what machine my app runs on" vs "kubernetes is to complex"

"Dependencies change to often" vs "I don't have time to maintain this thing I wrote myself"

"I just want the infrastructure to figure out what I need" vs "I want to be able to build whatever I want with a bespoke language/framework/database/architecture"

> it's a knock against the tech itself that it forces all this incidental complexity on you.

If I were to say that Kubernetes is the magic secret sauce that fixed all the incidental complexity I would get laughed out of the room. There is no magic secret sauce to the incidental complexity, the more we try to fix it the more we create (or the cheap-fast-good problem. This is probably easy if there are no cost limitations)