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"DevOps is ruining my craft"

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Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#2

Post by snorkel »

I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "agile" and deploy new features everyday like Facebook, why can't we do that? It wasn't even worth answering.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#3

Post by hack_edu »

I don't understand where this sysadmin is coming from. From a practical perspective, what's the point to drive the wedge between DevOps and 'traditional' sysadmin work. He's just critiquing the work of fellow administrators. They are BOTH sysadmins. Just as higher and higher level languages come out, higher and higher level abstractions of administration are required. With greater complexity of systems, more administration is necessary.

Deployment is so much more complicated today than it was just a few years ago. What we call 'DevOps' is really just a subset of systems administration work. Every developer (yes, sysadmins are developers) has specialties regardless of the term of the week.

Edit: Care for a reply with that downvote?

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#4

Post by 1123581321 »

The title should be updated with a [satire] tag.

As to its content, I would say that server administration as a craft has moved up a level. It is now developing programs like Chef, designing 'clouds', choosing hardware and so on.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#5

Post by windexh8er »

Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand - few do it that way anymore, and those who do are premium brands, built for very specific purposes wherein it doesn't make sense to automate those things. If cars were built all by hand, one by one, by "artists" they would not be affordable or as reliable as they are today. There is consistency, there is scalability, and there is reference in automation.

Do you think Amazon builds one compute node at a time? You may think it is art, but you can conversely look at a very sterile, well built environment where there is no room for error as art as well - something produced by DevOps.

Finally DevOps threatens nothing, at least nothing that shouldn't be. It promotes progress. Why? Because if your skill and craft is so good, why not be able to push it to the masses. And if you want to remain in the realm of niche then find the players that need one-off art. Past that, DevOps is long overdue.

DevOps hasn't ruined anything. Get over sysadmin as "art", otherwise I have unicorns and rainbows to sell you. Sure, there are good sysadmins and bad, but it's a stretch to say that you're so good your job can't be replicated with a build framework that fosters sane and repeatable process.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#6

Post by jetsnoc »

Too funny. I sure hope this is satire. Personally, I find writing chef recipes, building cookbooks, defining roles and managing the attributes of systems to be more of a beautiful art and craft than managing systems individually. To me, automating infrastructure feels more like a beautiful masterpiece than building one-off servers that are poorly documented and rarely configured the same.

It's an amazing thing to "knife vsphere vm clone" and "knife bootstrap" a system! Even though I built and implemented our automated architecture I'm still amazed every time I have a precise production system in under 5 minutes servicing client requests.

I think Chef may have found the equivalent to my systems administration G-Spot =P

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#8

Post by klochner »

Satire. Come on people, I know it's early but this is hard to miss:

    Sure, you might get your precious “predictability”, 
    but at what cost? I mean, can you even still remember
    that rush of intrigue and anticipation you get when
    your application refuses to work on two of the twelve
    servers it was deployed to? The thrill of the hunt as
    you figure out exactly which configuration settings are
    different and, of those, which one is causing the
    problem? The sweet taste of relief that you get after
    hours upon hours of debugging finally narrowed it down
    to a rogue registry setting?
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