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DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

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Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#71
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't unique to devops, this is a general software thing. But there is an answer, which is the standard technology stack: - AWS - Postgres - Linux - Docker - Jenkins or similar - Slack - Pagerduty - Jira - Packer - Terraform - etc If you stay on the path there will be dozens of tools, plugins, and paths to do outstanding things with minimal work. Parallelising builds for example is built in to jenkins (if you de…

You'll probably spend at least an hour figuring out IAM permissions before you even get to deploy a VM.

Well, you will certainly the first time sure. But in your next 3 jobs it should be much easier.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#72
post #32

What upsets me about devops work is that everything I do at a client is a lineage of architecture and design that needs to be maintained going forward and it only exists at that client. The lineage of interesting or useful things I do are tied to the client and dies with that client or when I leave. I just think of the thousands of CI/CD systems, build systems, attempts at parallelising builds, impressive optimisatio…

What upsets me about DevOps, is I know ops pretty well, but am not on par with dev, and every job that just needs someone to ops work now wants to quiz me about O(n) before they'll interview. Then I look around at the people who are good at the Dev part and the don't know their way around an os or cloud infra.

Those concepts arent that hard though. Just spend a day and familiarize your self with it. The most important take away from those kinds of questions are, can you pick the right data structure when you need to. Using a list vs a hash map, and will you avoid doing things like nested for loops. Big O just puts into words why you want to avoid those things. Most of the concepts should be intuitive already if you have some experience. Personally I haven't seen an interview go in deeper then that.

If your writing a script that will touch 10k servers, the operation is likely already slow. if you throw an unnecessary for loop that iterates over everything and runs something, that's going to a painfully slow script and wasteful.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#73

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

I joined the industry when "Systems Administrator" was becoming a generic term for "person who adds users to a server". Same thing happened to "DevOps": Google made some noise about how cool it was for coders to do Ops work, so people started assuming "DevOps" meant "a coder who adds users to a server". Stupid people come to stupid conclusions and popularity cements the new definition. Same thing with the terms "hacker", "skinhead", etc. C'est la vie.

DevOps died because it was a handful of engineers trying to force a movement about solving business problems. We were never going to be successful. Business people need to push the movement, not us.

That said, we can continue the movement anyway, if only to improve our own work. If more true DevOps faithful become managers, then directors, then VPs, then maybe in 30 years engineering orgs won't be run as horribly as they are now.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#74

Lately I've been made to understand that DevOps or Software Engineering is not for me, capability/maturity models, processes written in anything other then code, or metrics this and that just ism't me. We can argue about the meaning of words all day long but like I said this just isn't me. Some of us just prefer to say close to the metal (as in reality with all its complexity that escapes the precision of words and t…

I don't want to disappoint you, but what you want to do is not really supported by many companies anymore. Maybe the cloud providers would be interested in someone close to the metal. A few companies still run their own data centers, but even for them, hardware is so cheap it's usually easier to just throw more hardware at the problem than optimizing what you've got.

The one area where you might want to focus is HPC. All the companies building huge GPT models need highly optimized hardware.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#75

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

> a new name for System Administrator

System Administrator responsibility is limited to...adminstration/operation.

If you have "DevOps" positions that have dual responsibility to operate and develop, that it something different, no?

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I'm not saying this is actually the case. But DevOps being a job is not necessarily just a rebranding.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#76

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

> From my perspective, the greatest achievement of the DevOps movement was to push the bar higher for the expected skill level of the average SysAdmin. I see that as a good thing.

I wish I agreed. As far as I can see, the title is just as closely associated with being an expert consumer of cloud services as it is with actual skills relevant to development and IT operations, or anything we'd recognise as sysadmin today.

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#78
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to forget that 10-15 years ago, the most common dev/ops model was "toss it over the fence" Hum... My first guess is that what really changed was the ratio of developers working on places that do this to the ones working on places that integrate the jobs. The wall was never the only model around. It still isn't. The same kind of company that practiced it still largely have walls. The IT industry just hired…

> Hum... My first guess is that what really changed was the ratio of developers working on places that do this to the ones working on places that integrate the jobs. Well sure, and that's because software companies that integrate the jobs is now so much more widespread and commonplace, thanks to "devops". Kind of my point.

I agree, but I think the GP makes a good point that it wasn't really necessarily any sort of initiative or movement within the organizations that had bad practices—or even the types of organizations that had those practices, like legacy IT orgs—but instead the groundswell of new organizations, including startups, small/medium-businesses, and other more-modern technologies companies, that drove the adoption of new practices. And in most cases, they did this by necessity—they didn't have the funding to pay two separate teams to manage their new website, they didn't have the luxury to wait for 6 month deployment cycles, they needed the reliability of continuous testing but were able to take the up-front cost of short-term unreliability to build up those test suites. Only once engineers who had used these practices and seen them be successful at other companies started to migrate to more legacy industries did devops practices start seeing adoption outside of the "bleeding edge"

Re: DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model

#79

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator. Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was Syst…

As a developer and sysadmin, devops is distinctly different thing. Deep knowledge of operating systems is traded for knowing how to manage an entire virtual data centers with code. This is far beyond the “scripting automation” of the past. In my perspective, DevOps is a fundamentally different job from what Systems Administration has historically been. It’s a strange new world to me but I like it.

It is for you. It isn’t for HR and hiring managers.
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