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DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

thenewstack.io

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Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#11

Post by drewcoo »

chgs wrote: post #7
gustavus wrote: post #2

DevOps like Agile was a beautiful idea with a coherent underlying well reasoned philosophy. DevOps like Agile was then hacked to pieces and had its corpse paraded around by sleazy consultants and idiotic management that was told "you can save all this money on all your infrastructure people by making your developers do all the ops stuff to." And who doesn't like saving money on those useless crusty old system adminis…

To me, agile is simply People over process Results over bluster Flexibility over rigidity

how strange!

for me it has

always been

whatever the

highest paid person

wanted: "Agile"

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#12

Post by [deleted] »

gustavus wrote: post #2

DevOps like Agile was a beautiful idea with a coherent underlying well reasoned philosophy. DevOps like Agile was then hacked to pieces and had its corpse paraded around by sleazy consultants and idiotic management that was told "you can save all this money on all your infrastructure people by making your developers do all the ops stuff to." And who doesn't like saving money on those useless crusty old system adminis…

[deleted]

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#13

Post by pojzon »

ngc248 wrote: post #4
kelnos wrote: post #3

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I "enjoy" doing my own ops part of the job because it often feels like I have fewer roadblocks in my way. I build my stuff (or fix my stuff), test it, build some deployable artifact, and deploy it. I do it all on my own schedule, immediately when I'm ready to do each step, and I don't have to wait on someone else. But if I'm being honest, I have spent so so so many hours…

Exactly, dunno what to call it ... but every new concept starts out good, gets crazier and crazier and sometimes it may become good again, but most of the time it just devolves into more crazy. In one of the orgs I worked, ther was a team which worked on the basic devops framework which the application teams could use to then configure their resources. It was a very sane approach.

Nah, it works like this:

- we get a new methodology by remarkable ppl who can make it work really well

- some managers/consultants decide to modify it, twist it, with reasoning that „its hard to do well”

- the initial thing is lost in translation, twisted and bent to sell better by consultants or fit nonfunctional corps

Agile, DevOps, Software Craftsmanship, testing methodologies all did share the same fate.

Issue is that remarkable ppl are few and far in between. Medicore and subpar ppl are plenty.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#14

Post by Sparkyte »

It isn't dead, just companies refuse to implement DevOps philosophies because they assume it adds too much friction. When things run some and DevOps appears it isn't doing anything they fire operational engineers. Months later things go to shit because they thought they were not doing anything. Operational engineers or Site Reliability Engineers are essential because they consume toil work which would otherwise be there to distract a developer from developing. No one wants to solve pipelines and delivery methods and ensure stability and deliverability of code. Pipelines need as much continual development as a developer who makes the profitable applications.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#15

Post by abofh »

gustavus wrote: post #2

DevOps like Agile was a beautiful idea with a coherent underlying well reasoned philosophy. DevOps like Agile was then hacked to pieces and had its corpse paraded around by sleazy consultants and idiotic management that was told "you can save all this money on all your infrastructure people by making your developers do all the ops stuff to." And who doesn't like saving money on those useless crusty old system adminis…

It's always been the people, not the process. I've basically been the same sysadmin with a CS degree I've been since before I got a degree. I've been called a developer, a sysadmin, pool boy, IT, site reliability... It's all the same job - keep things scaling, running and watch the budget. Move the product forward by enabling the people who make the product. Occasionally be the adult in the room who knows how the sausage is made from the metal to the frontend.

People try and put a label on it to market it so they can sell it back to you.

My clients rarely know what I'm specifically I'm working on because I'm a technical grazer who just monitors the world looking for interesting problems - but they continue to pay me and I believe they extract a fairly positive value from me.

If I ever stuck to a single job title, they'd probably expect me to stop grazing - but that's what makes me happy and productive.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#16

Post by InvaderFizz »

The point about multiple deployments per day is well taken. Even those of us who wish to get there, have to contend with decades of process to make headway.

In my F500, we have a regular release cadence of every two weeks. We would like that to be daily or more, but we are probably one to two years of maturity away from making that a reality.

Not that we do DevOps in the way it was envisioned. We have a "DevOps" team that is responsible for platforms, processes, and operations, and a developer team that is responsible for the application code. The DevOps team works closely with devs to plan and architect the designs to make sure we're using the right services, scale, tuning, etc.

Within our org, the only real difference between DevOps and classic Ops is the skill level within the DevOps org is dramatically higher than what you used to find in the sysadmin crowd. Most of our DevOps people are cloud native, but a few have deep systems knowledge and decades of hardware, Linux, networking, security, etc experience. All of our DevOps team is very comfortable with Python, that ends up being our default for glueups. We even have a few former devs who also write custom tooling for our pipelines and other QoL improvements.

So for us, developers deliver application code, devops does everything else.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#17

Post by zmmmmm »

ibash wrote: post #5

Performance in the report is defined by how fast you can make a change to production, and how fast you can restore service. That’s fine I guess. What’s not taken into account is the time wasted on incidental complexity with devops tools. For example a highly competent engineer I know is burning hours trying to get ssl working on k8s/gcp with a specific configuration. Conceptually ssl is all straightforward, but there…

hitting this paradox a lot with containerisation.

Spent a good bit of effort building everything into a fully containerised stack, thinking once we got through the hard parts of it, everyone would be more productive and new devs would get up to speed fast. But it's not like that. We just have a whole different set of complexities, mainly at all the container boundaries where ports, volumes, user ids, file permissions, file paths etc now create issues where before they didn't.

I think we probably came out with a modest win, but I'm not sure it beat out what we might have achieved with the same effort going to other productivity measures.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#18

Post by fock »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #16

The point about multiple deployments per day is well taken. Even those of us who wish to get there, have to contend with decades of process to make headway. In my F500, we have a regular release cadence of every two weeks. We would like that to be daily or more, but we are probably one to two years of maturity away from making that a reality. Not that we do DevOps in the way it was envisioned. We have a "DevOps" team…

ended up at a place like this too + in our project we, the devops-people, also develop and support the z/OS-data-integrations. I generally tell non-IT people it's like a sysadmin, but not the windows kind they interact with - you won't roll out fixes in 2 hours from testing to prod (including the process stuff) at that scale (PB of data-warehouse, some 1000 B2B-customers on different versions) if all you know is clicking buttons in Windows server.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#19

Post by Ekaros »

ibash wrote: post #5

Performance in the report is defined by how fast you can make a change to production, and how fast you can restore service. That’s fine I guess. What’s not taken into account is the time wasted on incidental complexity with devops tools. For example a highly competent engineer I know is burning hours trying to get ssl working on k8s/gcp with a specific configuration. Conceptually ssl is all straightforward, but there…

And when you choose badly the cloud platform that looked good at start. But later becomes complete pain... Always finding new amazing ways to break things... (looking at you Azure Container Instances)

In the end for some light work loads could have been just thrown on VMs already running for other reasons. And it would have saved lot of time and effort... And it could have still be deployed with some level of devops...

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#20

Post by fulafel »

I think this [1] is mistaking some post-devops developers for "low performers".

The survey questions in slide deck p 13 (https://cdfound.lfprojects.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/up...) could all be "no" for someone who deploys to Firebase or a low code platform. Even if they are doing continuous deployment.

[1] "[...] while 83% of developers are actively engaged in DevOps, there’s been a troubling increase in the proportion of low performers in deployment metrics."

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