Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 363 posts

Re: DevOps is broken

#291

Post by boppo1 »

duxup wrote: post #43
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…

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…

>microservices

I never miss an opportunity to share my favorite piece of comedy this decade:

https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

Re: DevOps is broken

#292

Post by dijit »

boppo1 wrote: post #291
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…

>microservices I never miss an opportunity to share my favorite piece of comedy this decade: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

it's too close to reality.

There is a good talk that is also comedic as it comes from the perspective of someone who wants to fail at doing microservices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWgRw5jiYy0

Re: DevOps is broken

#293

Post by GauntletWizard »

JamesBarney wrote: post #286
GauntletWizard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shared database can be a reasonable microservice boundary, especially when using database-as-queue or database-as-mucroservice. In the former, services a, b and c can insert and query but only D can update, i.e. any service can creat a work-order but only D can mark it completed. I. The latter, nobody can read or write and all access to tables is done through stored procedures. I don't recommend either, and it's stil…

The benefits of the microservice pattern are you can build separate teams responsible for different business logic, and they can have their own deployment schedule. You don't get either of those benefits when a b and c have to coordinate on their work-order creation business logic, and a, b, c and d all need to be deployed at the same time anytime the schema changes. Btw some of the confusion might be what I mean by…

I think we're in violent agreement - A database can be a queue and that doesn't link things as the same, but it's easy to break those promises and you need to be clear in that promise to begin with. If two "microservices" have to move in strict lockstep, they're not microservices, they're components of a larger service.

Re: DevOps is broken

#294

Post by g051051 »

mikebenfield wrote: post #167
g051051 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreement. Agile and devops have done more to wreck software development than anything I've seen in more than 30 years in the industry.

I think you misunderstood your parent post’s point.

Rereading it a few times, I think you're right.

Re: DevOps is broken

#295

Post by lucasyvas »

lolinder wrote: post #51
lucasyvas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more nuanced. I care, but my skillset demands I spend more time on the Development side, so Operations must take the backseat in my mind because of this incentive structure. Asking one person to do two (actually three) job functions is a scam. Most developers have to do Frontend, Backend, and Ops. These have wildly different mindsets and feedback loops and not enough time exists. Don't hate the player, hate the…

> Asking one person to do two (actually three) job functions is a scam. The word "scam" is overused. It's a scam if it was a bait-and-switch. It's not a scam if it was advertised this way up front. In the latter case it's just a job whose description you don't like.

It is a scam. It should absolutely be assumed that you could perform these job functions - it makes you a way better engineer! But being expected to is a scam because the skill ceiling on each is so amazingly high that only a scam artist would expect someone to be able to perform all three to a specialist level. The same issue happened when QA departments got the boot. I deeply understand testing strategies (both manual and automated) but this is an important enough job that it deserves a dedicated person. Not having this person is exclusively because the business is trying to save money and make the worker easily replaceable.

It is not better for the department members or the software itself. It is only good for the bottom line. Yes, if you know it all you'll be valued higher - but the company is still reaping the majority of that benefit from you and not rewarding you with 3 salaries. You should not perform all the roles because it's economically idiotic to do so. You could contract out all 3 services and make a shit ton more money than you would performing them in a salaried position.

That is a scam.

Re: DevOps is broken

#296

Post by javier_e06 »

The name meant something a while ago: Something along the lines of:

"Turning the carnival bumping cars into a ferry's wheel or maybe the teacups"

Today's Dev-Ops is a Teacher's Lounge Room with a big suggestion box by the door.

One more shortcoming in the long list of modern needs.

Re: DevOps is broken

#297

Post by boppo1 »

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…

> money being dumped into the economy

This is my theory too, and as someone learning to program (hopefully as a career), I'm very worried what a new paradigm of tightening will do to the field. I feel like LOTS of people who think their stack is secure are going to get dropped because at the end of the day, lots of the B2B SaaS doesn't actually deliver anything to the world of material needs.

Re: DevOps is broken

#298

Post by ozim »

taylodl wrote: post #128

I disagree. DevOps was intended to break the organizational mindset of having this group of people here doing this set of activities and this other group of people over there doing that set of activities when in reality both groups of people are needed to work together and deploy software. It was about breaking down those organizational silos. Anybody creating a dedicated "DevOps" team was way off the mark, unless th…

I think that was not mentality. Maybe after years of working that way it turned out into mentality.

That was employee utilization approach where you hire 1 DBA and he runs all DB stuff because hiring DBA for each team does not make financially sense as there is not enough day to day work for DBA specialist on a project/product.

Other stuff is that DBA/SysAdmins have to have access to customer - company data so you still need separation of duties (no devs access on prod systems) and it is easier to make guy part of "OpsTeam" and give him access across all systems than get "Ops" person configured per project\product.

So why "DevOps" if you get operational overhead and you cannot "utilize employee 100%"? Because in most companies delivering new features is more important than making Joe Dbaer closing tickets like in factory because we learned it actually is not efficient when "important feature X" is delayed because Joe was doing his job fine but feature X was in queue.

Re: DevOps is broken

#299

Post by lolinder »

lucasyvas wrote: post #295
lolinder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asking one person to do two (actually three) job functions is a scam. The word "scam" is overused. It's a scam if it was a bait-and-switch. It's not a scam if it was advertised this way up front. In the latter case it's just a job whose description you don't like.

It is a scam. It should absolutely be assumed that you could perform these job functions - it makes you a way better engineer! But being expected to is a scam because the skill ceiling on each is so amazingly high that only a scam artist would expect someone to be able to perform all three to a specialist level. The same issue happened when QA departments got the boot. I deeply understand testing strategies (both man…

I perform all three roles for one company. I agreed to it upfront. I do it in less than 40 hours a week at a very respectable salary. I get maybe 1 after hours call a year for an Ops task. My boss knows that I won't do QA or Ops nearly as well as I do Dev, and he knows that QA and Ops time come out of Dev time (not personal time) and he's okay with that because that's the stage we're in.

If you think that is a scam, I don't know what to tell you.

Re: DevOps is broken

#300

Post by woeirua »

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…

There is this moronic obsession with "scaling" in this industry, and it just blows my mind. You can have a wildly successful and profitable company while serving just a few hundred customers that requires nothing more than a basic LAMP stack.

Meanwhile people are now spending millions of dollars and years of person-hours building MVPs in the cloud that won't ever go anywhere because the business model sucks.

Focus on delivering value to your customer first. How you get there is quite literally irrelevant to your customer.

Post reply on HN