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It Was Never About Ops

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Re: It Was Never About Ops

#11

Post by toast0 »

stonogo wrote: post #2

It's fun to watch people learn the systems administration trade, but it's a little disheartening to watch them conclude -- incorrectly -- that proper systems administration is some kind of software engineering job. Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... so many phrases to describe various jobs which all, when executed successfully, converge upon the same set…

A lot of people doing software have some sysadmin experience, and a small company probably doesn't have enough work for a full time sysadmin. And a part time sysadmin won't work because you need on-call.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#12

Post by toomuchtodo »

CodeMage wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[removed]

In my humble opinion, based on my humble work experience, this trend has not originated with overconfident engineers, but rather with cost-cutting managers.

I removed my comment because it painted with an overly large brush.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#14

Post by joesmo »

Couldn't agree more. If you have a monolith, you can probably get away doing dev ops as long as you don't grow too much. We have a handful of microservices and trying to keep up with the ops work has been hell, though part of that is due to AWS's tools. And this is without even a growing user base, just a growing app base. Burn out is definitely a problem in either case.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#15

Post by draw_down »

stonogo wrote: post #9
draw_down wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about that role, it's more about the interface between the people responsible for running the code and the people responsible for writing it, and to what degree each should be able to do the other's job. Just throwing shit over the wall isn't any good either.

This is a common answer which presumes that all businesses are development companies, or that they are development companies which are legally allowed this interplay between the programming team and the production team. There are places (places with a lot of money on the line) that do not fall into these categories, and yet the solutions are not so different. I'm just intrigued by the level of effort Silicon Valley i…

Hmm, OK. Yeah, if you legally have to separate the two roles then I guess you'd do that. There still needs to be some sort of interface, though, that's all I am saying.

For example, in places I've worked there was a "definition of done" where in order to have a new service be taken on by ops, it had to meet certain criteria so that the people running all these services had some common basis for diagnosing and running them. You don't want 100 different ways of calling a healthcheck on a service. You want service nodes to be able to handle a hard shutdown without data loss, maybe. Stuff like that

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#16

Post by Baeocystin »

toast0 wrote: post #11
stonogo wrote: post #2

It's fun to watch people learn the systems administration trade, but it's a little disheartening to watch them conclude -- incorrectly -- that proper systems administration is some kind of software engineering job. Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... so many phrases to describe various jobs which all, when executed successfully, converge upon the same set…

A lot of people doing software have some sysadmin experience, and a small company probably doesn't have enough work for a full time sysadmin. And a part time sysadmin won't work because you need on-call.

It's a niche. It's how I earn my living. I work for small companies that don't have enough daily work to keep someone like me around, but they can pay me a retainer to be on call when Something Bad™ happens.

It's actually pretty fun to have an ear in a wide variety of businesses, you wind up learning a lot outside of the technical world.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#17

Post by unethical_ban »

stonogo wrote: post #2

It's fun to watch people learn the systems administration trade, but it's a little disheartening to watch them conclude -- incorrectly -- that proper systems administration is some kind of software engineering job. Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... so many phrases to describe various jobs which all, when executed successfully, converge upon the same set…

Being a good sysadmin in 2016 requires a skill in programming. The ability to write apps and services that interact with your infrastructure's APIs is necessary to automate all the toil we've done since the beginning. (See google's SRE book)

As I have more control over hiring decisions on my team, an inability to use any programming language effectively (bash, python, perl, /anything/) would disqualify someone from a job in sysadmin or information security.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#18

Post by jvehent »

unethical_ban wrote: post #17
stonogo wrote: post #2

It's fun to watch people learn the systems administration trade, but it's a little disheartening to watch them conclude -- incorrectly -- that proper systems administration is some kind of software engineering job. Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... so many phrases to describe various jobs which all, when executed successfully, converge upon the same set…

Being a good sysadmin in 2016 requires a skill in programming. The ability to write apps and services that interact with your infrastructure's APIs is necessary to automate all the toil we've done since the beginning. (See google's SRE book) As I have more control over hiring decisions on my team, an inability to use any programming language effectively (bash, python, perl, /anything/) would disqualify someone from a…

Being a good sysadmin in 1996 and 2006 also required skills in programming. Sysadmins who don't code have always been limited in their career evolution. The same is true for developers who don't know anything about operations.

The focus on automation, and it being called DevOps, is simply an evolution of the work of sysadmins. The same way devs evolved toward TDD and other modern programming techniques.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#19

Post by pgwhalen »

yarou wrote: post #5
stonogo wrote: post #2

It's fun to watch people learn the systems administration trade, but it's a little disheartening to watch them conclude -- incorrectly -- that proper systems administration is some kind of software engineering job. Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... so many phrases to describe various jobs which all, when executed successfully, converge upon the same set…

> Is this why Silicon Valley is allergic to the phrase 'systems administrator'? Ops, Devops, SRE... Titles are a good way for management to increase responsibilities for an employee, without having to pay them more.

That's funny, I would say the exact opposite is more often the case.

Re: It Was Never About Ops

#20

Post by ryhamz »

Baeocystin wrote: post #16
toast0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people doing software have some sysadmin experience, and a small company probably doesn't have enough work for a full time sysadmin. And a part time sysadmin won't work because you need on-call.

It's a niche. It's how I earn my living. I work for small companies that don't have enough daily work to keep someone like me around, but they can pay me a retainer to be on call when Something Bad™ happens. It's actually pretty fun to have an ear in a wide variety of businesses, you wind up learning a lot outside of the technical world.

I suppose the natural question to ask here is if one thinks it is actually possible to be truly "on call" at multiple places simultaneously.

Is the extent of your agreement service within a day or something shorter/longer?

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