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A Eulogy for DevOps

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Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#161

Post by ruszki »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #134
wokwokwok wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deep deep irony of hiring someone specifically to do "devops". That's not devops. Devops is when you have developers who are empowered. When you hire someone specifically to do devops you are hiring an ops team and calling it devops. So, yeah. That still happens, sure. However, I do think it's changing these days: linkedin > connections -> control-F -> 'devops' => 0 hits "Site Reliability Engineer" -> 10 hits I t…

> Devops is when you have developers who are empowered. That’s just half true. If something doesn’t work in production, guess who can get mysql production logs? Not the developers. Can you access production dbs (not that that’s the way to fix things, but I have seen that in many orgs)? Nop. And if there’s anything you can do yourself (like changing things via TF files), you’ll need to wait until the gatekeepers appro…

What parent commenter says that when you have "devops", there are no such gatekeepers.

I always got higher compensation in such companies/teams, because they weren't dying. At least, when I joined :) They needed efficiency instead of control and keeping salaries down.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#162

Post by sgarland »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #158
sgarland wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" I’m told this is gatekeeping. Yes, and…? I’ve always found it amusing that I see little to no anger being directed at kernel devs for their gatekeeping. Almost as if deep down, people know that they shouldn’t be fucking with the thing that runs the world unless they are actually good at it. Or maybe th…

I agree that "gatekeeping" gets a bad rap. Sure, it can be taken too far. But at the end of the day, one needs to actually be qualified . And if they aren't, well sorry but you aren't good enough for the job. It doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you need to work on your skills before you're a fit.

Right. I don’t apply to jobs that cite a need for a decade of experience with data center-scale networking, for example, because I don’t have that. Not even close. I don’t view that as gatekeeping, it’s wanting people to be able to quickly ramp up to whatever quirks the environment has, without needing to learn fundamentals of the craft first.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#163

Post by dijit »

wokwokwok wrote: post #109
smusamashah wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bumped into a DevOps job at Teradata, did it for two years, then left for where I belong, in gaming as a backend developer. It was a corporate with good pays and perks including international travel etc. Some friends are still there doing DevOps very happily. Talking to them it never feels a like a dying field. I hated my DevOps role so pardon me for only reading the headings of the article, but talking about it in…

The deep deep irony of hiring someone specifically to do "devops". That's not devops. Devops is when you have developers who are empowered. When you hire someone specifically to do devops you are hiring an ops team and calling it devops. So, yeah. That still happens, sure. However, I do think it's changing these days: linkedin > connections -> control-F -> 'devops' => 0 hits "Site Reliability Engineer" -> 10 hits I t…

Nobody agreed on what "DevOps" means.

A regurgitation of Sysadmins that knew some scripting?

Cloud Native Sysadmins?

Patrick Dubois said "a systems administrator working with an Agile mindset", and this guy started DevOps Days; which is where we get the term.

The "merged teams" spiel is from the "10+ Deploys a day" talk from Flickr, and it's but one definition of what devops means.

This is why I personally consider it failed, it's meaningless because it means different things to different people. You can never "do it wrong" if you don't even have a definition that everyone agrees on.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#164

Post by giantg2 »

sgarland wrote: post #159
giantg2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'fades when promo season comes around, because those “aren’t core skillsets,” or something similar.' Exactly what I'm going through right now with a potential PIP. Last year I was told there was a solid basis for me being the getting the highest rating, but only if my core work was faster. Now they want to PIP me like nothing else I contribute to matters.

I’m very sorry. I quit a job once because they couldn’t follow their own rubric for promos. “We’ve written down objective guidelines for what constitutes your relative performance.” “Great, looks like I’m a shoe-in.” “Well… there are intangibles.” “Then why have the rubric?”

Yep. The speed issue they are pulling is an area that doesn't have any objective standards. So I ran a JIRA query to see how I stacked up against the other person who was my level on the team. We completed almost the same number of points over the course of this year...

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#165

Post by wyclif »

hitsurume wrote: post #105
llama052 wrote: post #54

I'll start by saying that I think knowledge for knowing layers underneath the application is fading in some circles, and that makes me sad. Having been a frontend guy some 10+ years ago, into a network engineer, then infrastructure engineering and now SRE. The amount of people on both sides of the developer circle and operations circle that do not want to understand what's going on is mind boggling. I was around when…

I'm interested in knowing more about how you guys implemented the operator model and decided on those tools. Was there a book or anything that was helpful in all of this?

I came here to ask this question as well!

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#166

Post by wyclif »

deafpolygon wrote: post #104

So much of DevOps is being folded back into traditional roles now that the tooling has stabilized, and people are becoming disillusioned with the build, test, deploy loop. It doesn't scale very well: the larger the codebase/team, the more burden on each individual to make this work.

What job title will DevOps roles shift to? Will it be "platform engineering" as some in this thread suggest, or will it be the traditional title of SRE?

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#167

Post by physicles »

stackskipton wrote: post #94
weitendorf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument against Kubernetes is not that you should go backwards from it, but that there is a huge need for something better than it. Many big tech companies have platforms that are better than it which aren’t properly (if at all) externally productized. And the fact that many medium companies have “platform teams” configuring Kubernetes and gluing together basically the same set of tools (source, build, test, rel…

Big tech companies are willing to invest in those platforms and mold them to work like they want to work. Few other companies do so and Kubernetes becomes the way to get big tech like platform. I do agree it could be better but it's Un opinioned nature also let's these companies shape it in a way that matches where they are. Also, probably biggest issues with it only come up if you are not in managed Kubernetes which…

K8s does solve a huge set of problems. But I agree with GP that all the non-application-specific parts on top, especially observability, are a huge time sink. The industry could use a Rails for the cloud. We built ours from the ground up and we’re in a good place now, but we kind of had to reverse engineer things like logging requirements from security questionnaires. I suppose these are things that consultants and saas companies can charge a lot of money for, so there’s no desire to open source it.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#168

Post by mikrotikker »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #158
sgarland wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" I’m told this is gatekeeping. Yes, and…? I’ve always found it amusing that I see little to no anger being directed at kernel devs for their gatekeeping. Almost as if deep down, people know that they shouldn’t be fucking with the thing that runs the world unless they are actually good at it. Or maybe th…

I agree that "gatekeeping" gets a bad rap. Sure, it can be taken too far. But at the end of the day, one needs to actually be qualified . And if they aren't, well sorry but you aren't good enough for the job. It doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you need to work on your skills before you're a fit.

Unless I'm brown or gay; then you're a homophobic racist gatekeeper.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#169

Post by udev4096 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #157
udev4096 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible is a lot more than just "YAML to Bash". For instance, Bash scripts are not idempotent. Ansible playbooks are. Sure, you can hack together a way to ssh and run commands very easily but it will break at some point

Bash scripts are as idempotent as you want to make them, so I think the comparison holds.

If it were that easy, no one would be using Ansible

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#170

Post by sadops »

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.

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