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"DevOps is ruining my craft"

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Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#11

Post by cpfohl »

hack_edu wrote: post #3

I don't understand where this sysadmin is coming from. From a practical perspective, what's the point to drive the wedge between DevOps and 'traditional' sysadmin work. He's just critiquing the work of fellow administrators. They are BOTH sysadmins. Just as higher and higher level languages come out, higher and higher level abstractions of administration are required. With greater complexity of systems, more administ…

It wasn't my downvote, but I'll bet it's because the article is satire and your response didn't quite catch that. ;)

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#12

Post by cunac »

snorkel wrote: post #2

I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…

why would you need to have access to prod ? Your development/staging environment (not local box) should be same as prod in most aspects except capacity so your push to prod is 2 step process developer -> staging -> prod

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#13

Post by peterwwillis »

klochner wrote: post #8

Satire. Come on people, I know it's early but this is hard to miss: Sure, you might get your precious “predictability”, but at what cost? I mean, can you even still remember that rush of intrigue and anticipation you get when your application refuses to work on two of the twelve servers it was deployed to? The thrill of the hunt as you figure out exactly which configuration settings are different and, of those, which…

I know, right? When he suggested that DevOps people would somehow get complex server management right just because they have a python interpreter I nearly fell out of my chair.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#14

Post by mgkimsal »

cunac wrote: post #12
snorkel wrote: post #2

I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…

why would you need to have access to prod ? Your development/staging environment (not local box) should be same as prod in most aspects except capacity so your push to prod is 2 step process developer -> staging -> prod

debugging is one (perhaps the only/primary) need. if you have stuff only breaking on production systems, it may be because of a number of factors that aren't easily replicatable in a testing environment. Sometimes the only feasible way (assuming you want fast answers because of live production downtime) is to get on to production servers and look at things there. In most cases read-only access should be fine.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#15

Post by Terretta »

windexh8er wrote: post #5

Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand - few do it that way anymore, and those who do are premium brands, built for very specific purposes wherein it doesn't make sense to automate those things. If cars were built all by hand, one by one, by "artists" they would not be affordable or as reliable as they are today. There is consistency, there is scalability, and there is reference in automation. Do you thi…

You've perfectly grasped the author's point, and repeated it in your own words.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#16

Post by maratd »

windexh8er wrote: post #5

Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand - few do it that way anymore, and those who do are premium brands, built for very specific purposes wherein it doesn't make sense to automate those things. If cars were built all by hand, one by one, by "artists" they would not be affordable or as reliable as they are today. There is consistency, there is scalability, and there is reference in automation. Do you thi…

So, that piece was satire. Unfortunately, satire is frequently used to attack the opposition without actually having to make a cogent argument.

> Get over sysadmin as "art" > Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand

Uhhh... no. My server is art. Now, I built my own build system, so do I really build servers by hand? No. But I built the build system. And I configured it. And it produces a server that is exactly to my specification. Down to every single file.

After the build? I click save. Then I duplicate. Then I have lots and lots of servers that are built to my precise desire. That's art.

Is my system more performant and secure than the system you built with:

(your favorite package manager) install (all the shit you need)

Yes. By a lot.

(chef or whatever off-the-shelf build system) install and configure (all the shit you need)

Yes. By a little.

But, hey, you know what? It's my server. And it's exactly the way I want it. And there's value in that. I own my stack.

Which makes writing software for it more fun. By a lot.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#17

Post by ineedtosleep »

klochner wrote: post #8

Satire. Come on people, I know it's early but this is hard to miss: Sure, you might get your precious “predictability”, but at what cost? I mean, can you even still remember that rush of intrigue and anticipation you get when your application refuses to work on two of the twelve servers it was deployed to? The thrill of the hunt as you figure out exactly which configuration settings are different and, of those, which…

I think this was more telling:

> “I come from a long line of sysadmins. My father was a sysadmin, as was his father before him. I have apprenticed at the feet of some of the greatest sysadmins American BankCorp has ever seen.

The lineage would mean that they've been in the business for 30+ years now?

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#18

Post by ericmoritz »

I get the same feeling now that I've adopted TDD. I've lost that magic of spending most of my time debugging code.

Now I just define the outcome I want, assert that a unwritten function produces that outcome and code the outcome. Sigh /s

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#19

Post by tristan_juricek »

cunac wrote: post #12
snorkel wrote: post #2

I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…

why would you need to have access to prod ? Your development/staging environment (not local box) should be same as prod in most aspects except capacity so your push to prod is 2 step process developer -> staging -> prod

Ideally, this is true.

But, I've worked in places that had bad resource planning, and didn't allocate the same kinds of resources in staging. When we had performance problems, there was no place else to go.

It can be hard to convince people to take their expensive hardware and IT time to set that production system up, and now, "duplicate it so we can debug". Eventually, I think you just give up and go somewhere else.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#20

Post by mahyarm »

ericmoritz wrote: post #18

I get the same feeling now that I've adopted TDD. I've lost that magic of spending most of my time debugging code. Now I just define the outcome I want, assert that a unwritten function produces that outcome and code the outcome. Sigh /s

You forgot about interacting with third party code that you have no control over. Like when you develop any mobile app.
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