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2023 DevOps Is Terrible

abidmoon.hashnode.dev

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Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#71

Post by tester756 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #51

I think the biggest issue with devops is that it originally meant "socialising" your sysadmins, by getting them to sit with your devs, so that shit didn't get lost because nobody thought to talk to the right team. But then it morphed into "oh lets innovate with infrastructure" but the innovation turned into "lol lets just restart from scratch and ignore history" Anybody who used early k8s can attest to how un product…

Admins wanted to increase their $$ and started calling themselves DevOps

And developed some automation to justify that

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#72

Post by dijit »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #67
KaiserPro wrote: post #51

I think the biggest issue with devops is that it originally meant "socialising" your sysadmins, by getting them to sit with your devs, so that shit didn't get lost because nobody thought to talk to the right team. But then it morphed into "oh lets innovate with infrastructure" but the innovation turned into "lol lets just restart from scratch and ignore history" Anybody who used early k8s can attest to how un product…

More a general question, but I’ve gotten pings in the past to be an SRE at a FAANG despite not doing much cloud stuff. Is it the type of role people take for a tour of duty and then transfer out of? I imagine there are SREs who enjoy it and stay there, but curious why they’d invite someone heavy on the dev side to interview.

Depends on the FAANG, Google famously throws devs at ops problems.

Ironically they realised this wasn't a good idea in exclusivity, so now they hire two disciplines: SRE-SWE and SRE-SYS.

SRE-SYS is as you would expect, pretty standard sysadmin knowledge from 2005 (IE; not helpdesk sysadmin, some scripting knowledge, heavy OS knowledge, heavy debugging knowledge).

SRE-SWE is much more programmer heavy with a light touch on OS fundamentals (based on what I consider important for OS knowledge FWIW).

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#73

Post by pdimitar »

dmart wrote: post #38

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 ti…

> 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.

Yeah, because that's exactly what it is.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#74

Post by shrimp_emoji »

mschuster91 wrote: post #54

Yuck, Portainer... when I read that I get nightmares. The problem is: when you give developers access to Kubernetes, to ECS, to Portainer, to whatever they. will. not. care. about literally anything. You'll find a hotpot of cobbled together Dockerfiles with zero provenance, with base images pinned to stuff years old, and completely inefficient layer ordering. Pipelines won't use caching or parallelism (okay, sometime…

And some devs do learn how Linux works but don't want to waste their time memorizing how shitty $DEVOPS_PRODUCT that'll be replaced in two years works. :D

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#75

Post by anotherhue »

medellin wrote: post #17
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.

The thing i have come to dislike is that in both companies i work for it lead to strange working relationships between ops/eng. anything that breaks in the deploy pipeline is now “the devops team problem” and they normally act like it’s also your fault. In the past this has meant people messaging me saying they are blocked because their dockerfile fails in CI. Then you walk through it with them and it’s also broken l…

I have seen infra/devops scapegoated too much. Half the time the developers in question won't even read the error output before raising a ticket.

The only solution I see is to enforce commit checks before hitting shared environments, but that comes with its own set of complaints.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#76

Post by KaiserPro »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #67
KaiserPro wrote: post #51

I think the biggest issue with devops is that it originally meant "socialising" your sysadmins, by getting them to sit with your devs, so that shit didn't get lost because nobody thought to talk to the right team. But then it morphed into "oh lets innovate with infrastructure" but the innovation turned into "lol lets just restart from scratch and ignore history" Anybody who used early k8s can attest to how un product…

More a general question, but I’ve gotten pings in the past to be an SRE at a FAANG despite not doing much cloud stuff. Is it the type of role people take for a tour of duty and then transfer out of? I imagine there are SREs who enjoy it and stay there, but curious why they’d invite someone heavy on the dev side to interview.

depends on the company and department.

the downsides of SRE is that you tend to be super hyper specialised in something thats only really of any sense to that department inside a company.

Moreover, you're dealing with real steel machines, and amounts of data that are prohibitorily expensive to just start again with. (the joy of AWS is that most of the times you can delete it all and spin it up again, often side by side)

also, some SREs are really specialised software devs, others like me are sysadmins who'd been swept by the current into SRE roles.

My company SREs are not like google's, where they are rock stars swanning about doing one line fixes that make everything .48% more reliable. We are computer nurses making sure that the wards of systems we look after aren't wiped out because a doctor forgot to wash their hands after taking a poo.

However, they both require the same skills: murder mystery and the ability to dive super deep into the stack, go from python->c->assembly. or service->VFS->cache->network->time weirdness

Also it could just be copy pasting service defs and making dashboards, then pinging devs saying "shits on fire yo"

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#77

Post by KaiserPro »

tester756 wrote: post #71
KaiserPro wrote: post #51

I think the biggest issue with devops is that it originally meant "socialising" your sysadmins, by getting them to sit with your devs, so that shit didn't get lost because nobody thought to talk to the right team. But then it morphed into "oh lets innovate with infrastructure" but the innovation turned into "lol lets just restart from scratch and ignore history" Anybody who used early k8s can attest to how un product…

Admins wanted to increase their $$ and started calling themselves DevOps And developed some automation to justify that

Shhhh, the union will get you.

Although sadly in most cases the automation was harder than the original service to look after.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#78

Post by pdimitar »

Replacing "DevOps" with "Platform Engineering" is not waving a magic wand and removing problems. The original article's main point is: "use DevOps marketplaces", more or less, but that comes with its own set of headaches (mainly auditing and making sure you trust them, which might easily take more time than rolling your own stuff).

I fully stand behind the "just have programmers that write internal tooling" recommendation though. Over the course of my long career this is what has worked best almost every time, and these are the programmers who get the least amount of respect even though they have to dance and juggle on a burning rope more often than not.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#79

Post by anotherhue »

KaiserPro wrote: post #68
dopylitty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding enterprise culture I’m curious who will be in this “platform engineering” team and what expertise they’ll have. In (enterprise) reality it will more than likely be a bunch of sysadmins and former “network/storage guys” who saw which way the wind was blowing and got a cloud cert. They really have no business forcing a particular infra pattern on application teams because they have no application level expert…

> In (enterprise) reality it will more than likely be a bunch of sysadmins and former “network/storage guys” who saw which way the wind was blowing and got a cloud cert. This sounds like a tale of woe. but. The fault is the culture, not the people doing the grunt work. Like devs, if you're used to nails, then you'll want to use a hammer for everything. > gives you expertise in application design/architecture. a sysad…

> "very yes"

is my new favourite consistency setting.

Re: 2023 DevOps Is Terrible

#80

Post by KaiserPro »

notanormalnerd wrote: post #57
KaiserPro wrote: post #51

I think the biggest issue with devops is that it originally meant "socialising" your sysadmins, by getting them to sit with your devs, so that shit didn't get lost because nobody thought to talk to the right team. But then it morphed into "oh lets innovate with infrastructure" but the innovation turned into "lol lets just restart from scratch and ignore history" Anybody who used early k8s can attest to how un product…

So you mean, DevOps has made Sysadmins more service oriented and now instead of having their pets and being in overprotective silos, they actually provide best practices and proper platforms for the poeple developing the software?

thats how it _should_ be.

The place it worked the best was where a team of sysadmins were split up and embedded with each dev team. each devop would then rotate onto another team every 6 months or so. This meant that _we_ had to document our shit for the next devop, but also helped eliminate key person dependencies.

We would then have a weekly offsite where we'd bitch and moan about our teams and conspire to make things better.

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