DevOps is a culture, not a role • Hacker News Board

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#101

Post by drvdevd » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #14

"DevOps Engineer" is simply just title inflation. In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" - both are expected to produce HA, Automated, Well Documented Infrastructure, to allow developers to run their code. Anyone not doing that is just a _bad_ "Systems Engineer" Developers don't call themselves "Agile Developers" because they started…

While I agree there is some title tweaking going on, IMO the empathy you speak of needs to go in both directions, especially if you're a smaller organization. It really needs to be, as you say, shared.

If shipping shit yesterday is the only goal your developers have in mind, they really can't expect quality Systems Engineering. They need to recognize that Systems Engineering is very much Engineering in the same sense as development and sometimes it can be just as if not more difficult and intellectually demanding especially in the face of such social pressures. Everyone needs to be on the same page.

Hence the need for such a culture and probably for an elevated title. I speak as someone who's worked in both roles and who's never read The Phoenix Project (tbqh).

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#102

Post by edgan » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

mugsie wrote: post #48

Everywhere you see the word "devops" replace it with the word "empathy". That was the true meaning of DevOps - fostering empathy and communication between different groups, and to stop the siloed "throw code over the wall to Ops" mentality that existed. By having a "DevOp's Engineer" you have admitted you have failed at DevOps, because you have created a new silo. A good team will have a combination of Operations Eng…

Yes, and no. Not creating a Devops position is just leaving the existing silos. The best way to tear them down is to put the Ops(DevOps) under the Dev manager. It reduces the code throwing, and gets rid of team politics.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#103

Post by edgan » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:52 PM UTC

notamy wrote: post #23

robert_tweed wrote: post #22

I've seen two prevalent definitions of devops: 1. It's a culture where dev and ops work together (as per TFA); 2. It is the application of software engineering practises (such as version control and test automation) to ops. I prefer the second definition because it's the only one that's got anything to do with new developments in infrastructure-as-code and isn't just a new name for what competent teams were always do…

Alternative third definition: Make the devs also be the ops guys

That is NoOps.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#104

Post by aNoob7000 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:53 PM UTC

cat199 wrote: post #83

preordained wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is too much. It's specialization out of necessity. I know enough "DevOps" to be dangerous, but in addition to having a deep knowledge of our product's codebase, the multiple features of our product, configurations, etc. there are not enough hours in the day to master (not simply be familiar with) Jenkins pipeline, Docker, AWS, Ansible, Zookeeper, etc, etc. 99% of the people who could claim to have knowledge of…

it is definitely possible to have fairly deep level of knowledge at all layers it just takes effort. That said, the larger the project, the more the need for specialization and the less possible it is for someone to keep up with all changes and be a domain expert.

I disagree. Maybe, there's a couple of guys/gals around that can go up and down the software and hardware stack and know where issues may lie when there's a problem, but I doubt there are many.

As a someone that's been in the tech industry a very long time, I came to the realization a long time ago that I couldn't be the expert at everything. Can I dabble in Oracle, Windows, Linux? Sure, would I want to bet my job on how much I know some of these products in the time of crisis, hell No!!!

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#105

Post by systems » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

edgan wrote: post #95

systems wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps, is a developer, that do admin stuff, because the development environment became more complex with the introduction of virtualization , cloud technologies and big data Admins who do Dev work should be called OpsDev ... A DevOps, is a Developer , someone who started as a developer and now do extra admin and systems work Not the other way around ..

I kind of agree with you that having this distinction would be useful. The real key is it isn't about "dev work". It is a cross between Ops, Dev, and Build. The build is actually more important than the Dev. Even bigger is who you report to. In the old world as Ops you reported to an Ops manager. The to Devops is that you report to the Dev manager, hence breaking down the silos. You could just call it Devops, but I c…

the key point i was trying to highlight, is that .. DevOps .. is really a Developer .. not a system engineer

a Developer that does extra stuff

there is a huge difference between a developer who does extra stuff, and a system engineer who does .. extra stuff

the barrier of entry to becoming a developer is a lot bigger than the barrier of entry to become an admin or system engineer

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#106

Post by SoMuchToGrok » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

user15672 wrote: post #9

benjaminwootton wrote: post #2

Having worked on over 100 DevOps initiatives, I'm inclined to disagree. 8 years into DevOps, automation, cloud computing etc, it's time to accept that DevOps is a specialism and a function that companies - especially big ones - need to put into place in order to adopt the principles. See here for further thoughts - https://devops.com/im-happy-devops-engineer-job-title/

If you have the job title "DevOps X", then you've missed the point of DevOps. The entire thing was brought in to remove the silos between SysOps and Dev. If you have people in the "DevOps" role, then you've just created a new silo, which means you just have traditional SysOps with a new and fashionable, but less meaningful name.

This train of thought can be dangerous - especially once your business grows to support more than a handful of customers.

Can you name a profitable organization that has successfully eliminated ops/devops? I've yet to find any example of this.

At a certain level of scale, silos can be a very beneficial thing.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#107

Post by jimwalsh » Thu, May 25, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #20

inopinatus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your disagreement. There's nothing we do under the umbrella of "DevOps" that wasn't part of competent service ownership twenty years ago. I read your article and the point that stood out for me was the notion that the skills to drive tools like chef, puppet are somehow new and different. But I know better, because although I use those tools today, back in the day we used cfengine and a bunch of declar…

As a relatively old guy, I always thought that DevOps was just the new name for what people have always been doing. It is literally just now that I've realised that other people think it is different :-) Possibly younger people don't understand what system administrators used to do...

DevOps role is different because it assumes full product ownership. Typical system administrators are focused on just the infrastructure portions. In a DevOps role you are more focused on the things running on that infra, as well as the infra. It's a more encompassing role than the traditional 'sysadmin' role.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#108

Post by edgan » Thu, May 25, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #41

In my experience, "devops" is just employer-speak for "We're too cheap to hire proper sysops or DBAs, so we'll expect you to do everything yourself."

I think there is more to it than too cheap. I think it is not enough money and not enough need. If the budget is $150k and it is SV, you aren't going to hire a team.

Another problem is I think Google and like companies have been vacuuming up the best of the best sysops and DBAs. This has had the effect of making them hard to find, and even if you can, you can't afford them. Then you see the conquences of companies trying to figure out an alternative plan. The results are Devops and NoOps.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#109

Post by bsharitt » Thu, May 25, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

I've been browsing around job boards lately and see a lot of "DevOps Engineer" positions, but the descriptions of each vary widely. Some of them appear to be "real" DevOps roles, that is they sit somewhere between the traditional dev and ops roles and the basic mission is to get code out to users fast. But then many of them are simply rebranded systems engineers, while others are dev roles where managing infrastructure is part of the job, while other job description have read like very basic sysadmin job descriptions.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#110

Post by mugsie » Thu, May 25, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #62

xorblurb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like Agile; the practices that emerged after the principles are sometimes (often?) WTF.

It confuses me when I read the Agile Manifesto and then look at Scrum, Lean, Kanban, XP, etc. On the one hand you have a manifesto advocating self-organising teams citing individuals over processes, while all those methodologies claim to be 'agile', but dictate your processes and how you should organise. To me, they seem incompatible. It's like several of the original signatories have developed doublethink. The one t…

Yeah, this gets me too.

Just because someone went to a training course, and now runs a standup, and use Jira or Trello does not make what you do agile.