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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#261

Post by [deleted] »

mikkergp wrote: post #245
CraigJPerry wrote: post #74

Hard disagree but Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Some interpretation of DevOps may be BS, e.g. >> Need a database? File a ticket with DevOps. That does seem like a bit short of the mark. E.g. that should be automated provisioning in 2018, never mind in 2022. Counter points as to why DevOps is not BS: Today there's just an acceptance that you version your code in VCS, it wasn't always that way. "Hey, this doesn't look rig…

>> Need a database? File a ticket with DevOps. > That does seem like a bit short of the mark. E.g. that should be automated provisioning in 2018, never mind in 2022. Serious question, as I think this has been part of my thought process in the challenges of platform engineering: what does it mean to automatically provision a database? I can think of lots of different examples that are insufficient in one way or anothe…

[deleted]

Re: DevOps is broken

#262

Post by sensanaty »

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…

This just reads like a "Damn kids, get off my lawn!" type comment to my admittedly young mind. Same with a lot of similar comments I see floating around HN, especially ones that have anything to do with web development.

Re: DevOps is broken

#264

Post by dijit »

lumost wrote: post #173
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…

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.

Sounds like a bad culture.

That won't be fixed with a new job title.

Re: DevOps is broken

#265

Post by tetha »

brightball wrote: post #94
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…

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

This becomes a lot more apparent once you're dealing with B2B customers and their nonfunctional requirements.

We've had situations in-house when devs built some simple microservice to handle some connection to a customers BI/DWH system - it's just 2 days of spring boot chugging to wrangle APIs around without state, nothing bad. But then, the customer started blasting that team with SLAs, backup questions like RTO, RPO, retention, regulation adherence of retention, the whole stack of IT security down to the physical access control.. That poor PO was caught just like a deer in the headlights.

This is some operational responsibility we're taking over for our dev-teams. We're providing the persistence, and this includes a defined backup and recovery strategy, a security strategy and such. And this also includes experience in dealing with these insane questionaires, and correctly pricing absurd requirements for custom backup solutions. And in fact, "we will have to schedule a discussion with ops about this" has ended quite a few of these requirements with "oh.. it's not that important". Intimidation with long job titles and appeals to external authority do work.

Re: DevOps is broken

#266

Post by dijit »

biggu wrote: post #163
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…

You hire build engineers and release engineers seperately? Does your product demand that level of specialization for these 2 functions? Just curious

I work on AAA video games, so unfortunately yes.

It's ok to have build-engineer doing release engineering if it's simple enough, but doing build engineering properly (Source control, artifact control, shared caches, dependency management of the compiler outside of the standard toolchain) is quite a large job.

Release engineering itself gets complicated when you take into consideration the different target platforms, most games get published on Playstation, Xbox and one of a handful of PC platforms (notably steam), plus the online systems and of course the development environments and internal release systems which are ubiquitous.

Build Engineering usually is the step between developers and QA, and release engineering is the bit after QA.

Both interact a lot with QA so could be rolled into the same role.

Re: DevOps is broken

#268

Post by Karellen »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #159
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…

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

Yeah, I've often seen "DevOps" described as "System Administration, but automating everything you can with scripting or whatever", to which my first thought was "WTF do you think Sysadmins do, if not exactly that?!?"

It's like they'd never heard a BOFH tell someone, "Go away now, or I will replace you with a small and uncomplicated shell script."

Re: DevOps is broken

#269

Post by HenriTEL »

bsenftner wrote: post #79
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…

My theory is we need to add "software history" to computer science education programs. How many developers whose careers began after 2000 have ever hand written or know the power of a Makefile? I've worked at research labs and major animation studios that back in the 90's the entire infrastructure was fully automated thru Makefiles, and it purred like a well fed cat. There are hundreds of thousands of forgotten perfe…

As projects grow the Makefile becomes pretty much a big bash script, but with a specific syntax that I always struggle with.

Re: DevOps is broken

#270

Post by pronik »

DevOps is an education and communication position. You won't get the devs to do ops, since they are good at development and don't know much about ops and the same applies to ops in reverse. You need people (ideally, on each product team) who understand enough of both sides to efficiently communicate problems and facilitate solutions. Before you make your devs write provisioning scripts for databases (which they can do, but probably won't get the trade-offs of different parameters), you might want to explain the difference between running database migration scripts on application server startup on a single-instance dev laptop and on a distributed master-master replicated database with multiple application server instances. You increase awareness, you provide platforms, you communicate. That's what DevOps and especially DevOps teams do. They are glue between people of different competence areas. The alternative is Peter's principle applied to both sides.
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