41–50 of 74 posts
What usually works across companies are somewhat standard systems and flows. But based on what I've seen in the past 2 decades, there's a bunch of different solutions to a similar problem and most have very different ways of solving challenges...
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…
PS consider that the people that sells you the "we deploy N times per hour" consider, rightly so, feature flag activation as a deploy
DevOps has different meanings to different organizations. Just by skimming over the comments here the problem becomes obvious. For some it is basically a platform integration team that assist product teams for what they call devops, for others they confuse it as a modern sysadmin role and for others like product developers they confuse being on-call "24x7" as some kind of devops principles. It's a heavily abused term…
> a modern sysadmin role As a sysadmin, I feel attacked. DevOps is not a modern used version of the sysadmin. It's a different shade with different expertise to apply to a slightly different field that what a sysadmin does. I've seen devoperators who don't know how to manage a server and I've seen sysadmins who don't know how to write scripts. One is not more modern or superior than the other.
Over the past 20ish years I've been: "sysadmin", "sre", "devops engineer", "cloud engineer", and "platform support engineer". Probably more titles, and roles, than I can remember to be honest.
I write scripts, I automate systems (in the past with perl, then cfengine, puppet,etc) via the use of AMIs and standard templates. I use strace to debug problems, and diagnose networking issues with tcpdump/wireshark. Nowadays I mostly use EKS/K8S, but at heart I remember debugging broken deployments with GDB and patching binaries with emacs and I like those simpler times.
I want to call myself a sysadmin, but people hiring for stuff want devops/cloud everywhere. It's all a mess. Still I like big networks and lots of systems, and it seems there's no shortage of things to improve no matter the size of the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why even use SFTP? Just have them upload blobs to S3 or Azure Storage. The security is better and both are serverless solutions that cost basically nothing at normal scale. I seriously don’t understand why people in 2024 insist in reproducing these core services but badly and at great expense. PS: Azure Storage is multi-protocol and supports SFTP! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/secure...
> Just have them upload blobs to S3 or Azure Storage. Not everyone can store their data in cloud services, most likely. That said, self-hosted S3 compatible solutions like MinIO might be a good choice: https://github.com/minio/minio or maybe SeaweedFS for something with a more permissive license: https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs
But then you would have people who can't figure out SSH trying to figure out private S3-compatible infrastructure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ops are an almost extinct species. This is infuriating at times. We ingest a lot of data from 3rd party systems of our clients for things like KPI analysis, the devs¹ provided various APIs for submitting data and we can read from various others, but good old reliable dumping-CSV-files-to-us-via-SFTP is still what most clients want to do. I have no problem with this², BUT the amount of times I end up talking to clie…
Why even use SFTP? Just have them upload blobs to S3 or Azure Storage. The security is better and both are serverless solutions that cost basically nothing at normal scale. I seriously don’t understand why people in 2024 insist in reproducing these core services but badly and at great expense. PS: Azure Storage is multi-protocol and supports SFTP! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/secure...
> I seriously don’t understand why people in 2024 insist in reproducing these core services but badly and at great expense.
Because those users have a flow that they like and don't want to change it regardless of all the pitfalls in that flow. "It works, there is just this one problem. Why don't you invent a solution for this one problem for us. I don't want to use S3, or Azure or whatever. Just give me an sftp endpoint I can upload files to". Oh CSV doesn't have a standardized way of parsing escapes? why don't you handle a `# escape=\` or `# doublequote` or `# singlequote` or `# ignore-new-lines-in-the-middle-of-a-string` and we will use that.
Heck, it's 2024, and we have a fully automated, source control (github, gitlab, bitbucket, etc) integrated, S3/Azure Storage/GCP Buckets integrated, Dockerfile and Makefile aware, application deployment service and we still have a non-trivial number of users asking "Why can't I just drag and drop my .php or .py files over fileZilla to deploy my code? I don't want to use git or docker or S3". Oh, you can't version our code updates when we just drag 100 files over sftp? why don't we update a `version.txt` file when we're done updating then you count that as a version?
The guy in the team that bothers with setting up computers, physical or virtual, configuring Jenkins, Bamboo, Team City,.., writes the RPM build scripts, and whatever else that other devs rather not do.
Just like Agile, DevOps and such, they all end up being ways to have conferences, books, consulting services,...
Sure, it lets you ship that app with postgres, clickhouse, redis, rabbitmq, task runners, workers, the jvm, 5 different versions of nodejs wedged in... But is this really a good thing?
Its like vacuum sealing poop in unlabeled bags and putting them into someone's refrigerator. Yay, surprise.
Docker/containers, k8s, and all the bent bloated habits eventually take a toll. Sure, it lets you ship that app with postgres, clickhouse, redis, rabbitmq, task runners, workers, the jvm, 5 different versions of nodejs wedged in... But is this really a good thing? Its like vacuum sealing poop in unlabeled bags and putting them into someone's refrigerator. Yay, surprise.
For me the real issue is that we still live in a world where many developers don't have anyone to hand that container off to. Even if your cloud helps you, you're likely still going to have to configure things like networking, and while I've done that myself because nobody else could, it really shouldn't have been something I did. The first time I did it, every application/service had 250 IPs despite using 3 or 4 and I'm fairly certain my vnet ate up like 50.000 IPs which I think you call a block? And as you can see, I still shouldn't ever configure network, but I'm still the best at it and nobody in management seems to want to change that.