A Eulogy for DevOps • Hacker News Board

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#171

Post by sadops » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 11:42 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #69

agentultra wrote: post #38

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,…

This is one of those things that still makes me scratch my head. When I started programming my code ran on a 2-4 thread machine with a couple GB of ram because that was the size of a relatively affordable commodity server. Today my code runs on a 2-4 thread pod with a couple GB of ram because... reasons I guess. The industry has been given servers with 100x the resources and collectively said "naw I'm good". Can't wr…

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Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#172

Post by solatic » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 6:22 AM UTC

osigurdson wrote: post #64

chefandy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no moral hazard, only an economic one. Er... No? If you take someone's money in exchange for goods and services, you have a moral duty to give them what you said you would. Not a broken version of it– what they bought. If you explicitly state they're getting an unstable product, then sure. If you actually do your best within reason and your service is broken, shit happens. Nobody is perfect, but you made a…

Is your argument than an amount of money approaching zero in the limit is morally distinct from zero - triggering a step change in behavior?

The point is that you confused moral hazard with economic hazard in claiming that there was an economic hazard but not a moral hazard. When you have 5 million users paying $1/each, then pissing off a hundred of them makes very little difference to your bottom line, i.e. low economic hazard. But morally, because you sold them a product for $1/each, you owe them warranty of fitness, therefore the low economic hazard, i.e. the low economic consequences, introduces high moral hazard. When the situation is flipped, with 5 customers paying $1 million each, your high economic hazard in the risk of losing a customer aligns your moral incentives to do correctly by them, and you therefore have a low moral hazard.

I largely agree with you, except that you flipped the terms.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#173

Post by solatic » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 6:32 AM UTC

The main thing the author gets wrong is that it's now much better understood amongst engineering leadership that development teams need at least one person with ops/infra skills. Development teams shouldn't wait for a centralized DBA team to pick up their schema change request, but neither does it make sense to ask frontend developers to learn all the ins and outs of running databases. Teams do need somebody to specialize in that skillset. This person with ops/infra skills is the modern Site Reliability Engineer (i.e. for most companies, a term that was inspired by Google's book, but distinct from Google's implementation of the concept).

As startups grow into enterprises, eventually there are benefits to be had from getting all the different SREs on the same page and working according to the same standard (e.g. compliance, security, FinOps...). Then, instead of each SRE building on top of the cloud provider directly, each SRE builds on top of the internal platform instead.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#174

Post by sadops » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 2:17 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #69

agentultra wrote: post #38

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,…

This is one of those things that still makes me scratch my head. When I started programming my code ran on a 2-4 thread machine with a couple GB of ram because that was the size of a relatively affordable commodity server. Today my code runs on a 2-4 thread pod with a couple GB of ram because... reasons I guess. The industry has been given servers with 100x the resources and collectively said "naw I'm good". Can't wr…

Devs don't know how to write software that doesn't immediately balloon to gigabytes of memory use for a "hello, world" application. Seriously, they've just never done it.

Re: A Eulogy for DevOps

#175

Post by sadops » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 2:18 PM UTC

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.

Fine, I'll say it: this is what ruthless cost-cutting gets us. But it's fine, I'm sure the stock buybacks are going so well for all involved.