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

2023 DevOps Is Terrible

abidmoon.hashnode.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 126 posts

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#31

Post by jen20 »

BeefySwain wrote: post #7
campbel wrote: post #4

The creation of DevOps teams instead of SRE / Platform seems pretty common and I think originates from ignorant engineering leaders and poorly defined roles and responsibilities. You want to leverage the expertise of the folks who focus on cloud infrastructure, but you can't move the responsibility of operations away from the application teams without seriously compromising incentives that effect quality, throughput…

Can you expand on what you mean by this? Specifically: "you can't move the responsibility of operations away from the application teams without seriously compromising incentives that effect quality, throughput and reliability"

To be more blunt about it: if the person writing the code is not the one on the pager at 3am, they have no serious incentive to make it correct or resilient.

This is why "you write it, you run it" is so important - the most reliable software is the software never written, but if something must be written, it's important that all incentives are aligned for it to work right.

Of course, this is only at the operational end - lack of incentive alignment is rampant in "product" organisations too.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#32

Post by elyoun »

expertentipp wrote: post #9

I'm technologically stuck in the era when everyone hated JavaScript. I provision instances with bash and services over REST APIs.

I just started working on a more devops/platform kind of role. I believe we're basically doing what you feel like is stuck in an era. Can you shed some light as to how JavaScript is used/ is an improvement?

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#33

Post by politelemon »

If the DevOps "culture shift" didn't solve problems for you, this will not either. You will still have similar problems, now abstracted away into a different team that operate at their own pace. They will also be overbooked, like before, with the difference that now they are serving multiple teams you didn't have to contend with before. They will not share your incentives or priorities for specific features. Their time will still not be taken into account during product planning.

Both the DevOps move, and its current issues, as well as platform engineering are organisational problems. Your organisation needs to be set up around this in order for it to succeed.

Notice that the article paints platform engineering with the same utopia like brush strokes that once painted "DevOps as a culture", only to be mangled in its handling and blamed for the problems that it brought about.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#34

Post by dijit »

steve1977 wrote: post #18

If you have a DevOps team, your company probably doesn’t understand what DevOps is about.

Given that everyone and their mother has slightly nuanced yet disperate definitions of exactly what devops is, I'm not sure.

DevOps? Oh you mean the developer experience people?

DevOps? Oh, the build pipeline people?

DevOps? Oh, the people who handle the cloud?

DevOps? Ah, you mean those folks who handle our observability!

DevOps? That's Katya, she's a developer but i'm not sure what she does except act stressed out all the time and slow us down.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#35

Post by candiddevmike »

expertentipp wrote: post #9

I'm technologically stuck in the era when everyone hated JavaScript. I provision instances with bash and services over REST APIs.

I have a tool that I'm about to release soon that you may be interested in. It's a way to configure servers (with bash or whatever you want) in a distributed, decentralized way. You build "patterns" which are signed build and run scripts that the servers can be pushed or pull the patterns from a storage provider (like a storage bucket). The tool exports various prometheus metrics that you'd use to determine the state of it and whether the patterns were successfully applied etc. Best of all, it's stateful by design, so when you add or remove things the pattern will clean up after itself. Message me if you want to be part of the beta.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#36

Post by stavros »

0x008 wrote: post #3
hinkley wrote: post #2

The fact that we have a “devops team” at work infuriates me. It’s enough to distract me me from how “Scrum” has destroyed Agile.

What is so horrible about it? Our devs are happy they can focus on fixing unit tests in pycharm, while others care about where the code is going.

It's like saying you have a self-service waiter.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#37

Post by convolvatron »

jen20 wrote: post #31
BeefySwain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? Specifically: "you can't move the responsibility of operations away from the application teams without seriously compromising incentives that effect quality, throughput and reliability"

To be more blunt about it: if the person writing the code is not the one on the pager at 3am, they have no serious incentive to make it correct or resilient. This is why "you write it, you run it" is so important - the most reliable software is the software never written, but if something must be written, it's important that all incentives are aligned for it to work right. Of course, this is only at the operational e…

as a software developer, every place I've tried to work that's "you write it, you run it" turns into me just spending all my time running the code as it already existed, with actually trying to improve reliability as kind of a bonus 10% task that no one ever talks about or asks after.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#38

Post by dmart »

To me, DevOps culture just feels like a way for businesses to save money by not staffing a dedicated infrastructure team and pushing all those responsibilities onto application developers.

The amount of time I've spent fiddling with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, Jenkins configuration, GitHub Actions configuration, AWS IAM, and so on over the past few years is absurd, probably more than the time I've spent writing actual application code.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#39

Post by pojzon »

DevOps is terrible because we want to have a team of fullstack expert engineers that have certs in every tech, but pay them for a single role.

First there are not enough ppl with that huge landscape of knowledge.

Second you would have to pay a salary of 5 ppl i.e. 500k/y to make ppl willing to spend that much time on work.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#40

Post by root_axis »

matsemann wrote: post #14
0x008 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so horrible about it? Our devs are happy they can focus on fixing unit tests in pycharm, while others care about where the code is going.

Because it's just a hip way of saying you have a sysadmin team. How can something or someone be "devops" if all the developers are in one team doing dev tasks, and the ops in a separate team doing ops stuff?

The term is meant to encompass the "infrastructure as code" workflow. The "dev" in "devops" refers to the skills necessary to read and write code that manages the state of the system infrastructure.
Post reply on HN