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A Eulogy for DevOps

matduggan.com

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Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#31

Post by altdataseller »

giantg2 wrote: post #7
29athrowaway wrote: post #6

The problem is when hardened system administrators and DBAs were replaced by people who were certainly not worthy successors. As that transition took place, a lot of the added value was eliminated.

But who needs to know what happens behind the facade of the services? It does everything for us! I miss the days of having an expert sys admin and DBA to help with tough issues. Now we're all on our own with no training. Most of the good people got axed or thrown into other roles. Becoming good at something only to have it thrown away and undervalued pisses me off.

What sort of skills does a sysadmin and DBA have that most engineers lack? Most engineers should know the basics of bash scripting, iptables, Unix logging, cron, systemd, etc. as well as SQL, debugging slow queries, optimizing them, backing up dbs, etc

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#32

Post by photonthug »

nsxwolf wrote: post #25

I still don’t really know what DevOps is. I have noticed, however, that over the last 20 years more and more power and flexibility has been taken away from me. I used to have passwords for everything and could deploy things and get things done on a dime, now there are layers of bureaucracy and middle fingers everywhere I turn. Is that DevOps?

That’s compliance, infosec, and arguably, just table stakes for a reasonably mature org. Sure it’s annoying sometimes but unless you enjoy the idea of randos with access to your own complete digital footprint, then everyone ought to see the wisdom in the idea of “robots only, no humans in prod”

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#33

Post by jascha_eng »

Just like agile, DevOps has some good intentions. It's always about how it's executed and like anything in software engineering you will run into trade off situations where you have to find the best solution for your organization and product.

I really enjoy working in a deploy often and fast environment though and I firmly believe that fast feedback loops are one of the most important things for development speed. And this is what DevOps at its heart is about. How you achieve this and how reasonable it is for your situation is left for you to decide.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#34

Post by osigurdson »

>> The User is the Tester

If you can afford to make the user the tester, you should. There is no moral hazard, only an economic one. If you have 5 million customers paying $1 / year, make the user do the testing via canary deployments, metrics, etc. If you have 5 customers each paying $1M / year, be sure to test it yourself.

The problem seems to be that people forget which regime they are operating in.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#35

Post by mingus88 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #25

I still don’t really know what DevOps is. I have noticed, however, that over the last 20 years more and more power and flexibility has been taken away from me. I used to have passwords for everything and could deploy things and get things done on a dime, now there are layers of bureaucracy and middle fingers everywhere I turn. Is that DevOps?

Who knows! Just like “SRE” you really need to know what questions to ask before you accept any position in these orgs

I briefly worked at a place where the SREs were responsible for replacing displays on the factory floor and the devops engineers took rotations approving terraform PRs all day long.

As it turns out, a lot of orgs just rebrand their job postings with whatever fancy industry term gets applicants, then they rugpull you into very mundane ops chores

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#36

Post by smcleod »

DevOps was breaking down silos between Devs and Ops. It was co-opted by Enterprises to instead be seen (just like with agile) as CI/CD tooling (which is just one means to an end) and they tended to completely ignore the culture and values which are arguably the most important components.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#37

Post by osigurdson »

>> abandon technology like Kubernetes

I think a lot of Kubernetes hate is misplaced. It is a great piece of software engineering, well supported and runs everywhere. You certainly don't always need it but don't create a bunch of random bash scripts running all of the place instead of learning how to use it.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#38

Post by agentultra »

Didn't help that we had made these components and services into commodities. Developers and organizations came to expect them. Of course you use CI/CD pipelines to build and deploy your software. Of course you use orchestration and autoscaling groups. And so on.

So that even if you're building small website for your local soccer club it's probably run through GHA on every change with a full red/green deploy process, run on autoscaling groups and so on.

Never mind that most of these applications' databases could fit into RAM on a single server with 24 cores and never even touch the system limits.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#40

Post by wild_egg »

altdataseller wrote: post #31
giantg2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who needs to know what happens behind the facade of the services? It does everything for us! I miss the days of having an expert sys admin and DBA to help with tough issues. Now we're all on our own with no training. Most of the good people got axed or thrown into other roles. Becoming good at something only to have it thrown away and undervalued pisses me off.

What sort of skills does a sysadmin and DBA have that most engineers lack? Most engineers should know the basics of bash scripting, iptables, Unix logging, cron, systemd, etc. as well as SQL, debugging slow queries, optimizing them, backing up dbs, etc

_should_ know is different than _do_ know. Most engineers have little to no understanding of those systems topics and the only DB knowledge they've picked up is what leaks through their ORM

A person who competently knows all those topics _and_ how to write application code is worth their weight in gold

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