DevOps uses a capability model, not a maturity model • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by bashinator » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

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…

Eh, I see devops as automated systems administration. Knowing how to be a good by-hand sysadmin is an enormous advantage in knowing how to automate things.

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

#82

Post by tra3 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

opentokix wrote: post #33

DORA Metrics is not a good place to start. This blog post is sales pitchf or whatever they are selling.

Curious to hear your thoughts. What's a good place?

I'd argue that if your releases take forever, or lead times are huge they are worth improving first. What would you look at first?

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

#83

Post by imwillofficial » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:57 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #34

galleywest200 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is nebulous. My title is DevOps. I do a lot of SysAdmin work, but I also work escalated tickets, write automation and integrations, read the flagship code bases when errors occur, I complain about the flagship code bases when bugs occur, and I file JIRA tickets about the flagship code bases when bugs occur -- but I do not write code for the flagship product. I think that is a key.

> but I do not write code for the flagship product. I think that is a key. Basically you clean up after big-shot devs, got it.

I like to describe it as "we are the helper elves helping Santa deliver presents"

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

#84

Post by crabbone » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:21 PM UTC

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

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…

For me, coming from Ops, DevOps seemed like a description for people who worked almost exclusively in Web, service-style companies, where their goal was to ensure that continuous integration and continuous deployment did what their names suggest.

Having a DevOps onboard also surely meant that the company didn't need a system administrator anymore, but that's not really because DevOps was a new name for sysadmin -- they automated sysadmns out of existence.

I still prefer not to touch Web and service-style products. And, in my world, DevOps doesn't really exist. People with similar set of skills are usually called "infra" or "automation". Having worked in automation department one would most likely have learned enough to apply for DevOps position in a company which needs that, and vice versa.

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

#85

Post by ussrlongbow » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

Chico75 wrote: post #40

robertlagrant wrote: post #4

This article is highlighting a problem with badly designed maturity models in general. If you have a good maturity model (e.g. for DevOps one based on DORA metrics) then the capabilities needed to arrive at a higher level can be determined per-org. That solves the real problem. I think the article has a fundamental "AB problem" issue.

I would encourage you to read the book "Accelerate" which was at the source of the DORA metrics, as it clearly advocate for a capability model, not a maturity one.

Do you have book ISBN? Thanks!

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

#86

Post by p_l » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:22 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #60

kayodelycaon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a developer and sysadmin, there is no trade and only difference is that you probably (and I'm saying probably because probably some poor fucker had at some point) won't need to debug NIC driver/firmware problems on "cloud" server. We have both on-prem and cloud stuff, we've ran automation (via Puppet mostly) from the very beginning, and so far biggest difference is that writing template-backed YAMLs is utter shit…

  As a developer and sysadmin, there is no trade and only
  difference is that you probably (and I'm saying probably 
  because probably some poor fucker had at some point) won't 
  need to debug NIC driver/firmware problems on "cloud" 
  server.

Then the words "private cloud" drop by, and you find yourself fixing idiotic purchasing decisions that somehow led you to building custom firmware ROMs for intel X520 NICs

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

#87

Post by morelisp » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #44

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

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…

> 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. The "DevOps" job title can arguably just be a sysadmin, but I do think the main ideals of the movement are just so tightly ingrained in software now that we don't even notice. It's e…

Your optimism is refreshing but ultimately wrong. We did "solve" those problems but then immediately 10xd the incidental complexity of both our development and operations work in exchange for nothing.

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

#88

Post by dijit » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

KrugerDunnings wrote: post #39

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…

This will be an unpopular opinion because HN is full of web folks: Do not listen to jedberg, he drank the cloud kool-aid long ago and I can only assume he is not looking at billing and TCO critically or sitting in the board room discussing why the infra costs are higher than the staffing costs.

Personally, I do care that cloud is in the order of 10x the price and do have to explain infra cost as a metric of our road to profitability to our board.

My company does work closer to the metal, especially because for us the notion of “scaling” is not that we can simply slap a load balancer or a cache in front of a bunch of servers and call it a day: when you work with HFT or AAA Games: the performance you get on a single machine really matters, as does the ability of that machine to work reliably since there is state.

People in HFT and games really bleed for people like you and I, since its not as simple as CRUD stateless HTTP stuff where performance is measured in milliseconds and the average node runs 2GHz on all cores with 14 different abstractions.

Cloud optimises for the web, when its not the web, there are major dragons- those are your people.

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

#89

Post by seidoger » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #44

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #42

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…

> 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. The "DevOps" job title can arguably just be a sysadmin, but I do think the main ideals of the movement are just so tightly ingrained in software now that we don't even notice. It's e…

> It's easy to forget that 10-15 years ago, the most common dev/ops model was "toss it over the fence"

15 years ago it was often still I without the C, integration that wasn't continuous. Code freeze 1 month before release, put all the bits of code together, everything breaks, try to fix it.

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

#90

Post by dogleash » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

Karellen wrote: post #36

a_c wrote: post #14

What is devops here again? Is it the The Phoenix Project one on one extreme or system admin for the cloud on the other extreme?

As far as I can tell, being in DevOps is like being a SysAdmin, except you write code to automate as much of your job as possible. ...so, exactly like being a SysAdmin.

A quip I liked when devops was new was “devops means checking your scripts into version control”