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"DevOps is ruining my craft"

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Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#21

Post by ww520 »

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

You can't reproduce a dev/staging environment with the same traffic pattern, user behavior, and request load as to a production environment. Google bots won't crawl your dev/staging environment and you won't know its impact until you see it. DDOS attack won't happen in your dev/staging environment. Click fault won't happen on dev/staging.

Developers probably shouldn't have root privilege on production but they need to have read access at the very least. They also should have write and deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment. Whatever mess they made there should be counted under acceptable loss.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#22

Post by jefe78 »

I chuckled at the obvious satire. However, I have heard of 'sysadmins' that are complaining with less humour in their voices. The 'pure sysadmin' role is alive and strong. Those being forced out by devops are either not very good or the organization's culture is at odds with what a true sysadmin is expected to do for them.

Also, in before, "Lol, Windows admin". I cringed when I saw a registry reference.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#23

Post by dedward »

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…

If your admins don't understand the code and crash things - that's an organizational problem that can be corrected.

Giving developers admin access isn't the answer.

I've seen both sides - where admins didn't undersatnd the environment well enough or the application in it and broke it, and where developers didn't understand the system well enough and pushed out code releases that broke things. Neither situation should exist if things are set up correctly.

Things should be automated and documented. You need systems knowledge as part of your development process.... it's not enough just to throw a PHP guy at something..... everything needs to be architected in a way everyone understands.

Several very important standards require that developers do not have access to production (PCI comes to mind if I'm not mistaken).

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#25

Post by mryan »

mahyarm wrote: post #20
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.

In this case you get the best of both worlds - if you mock the third-party API you can do TDD on all of your code, but you still get all the thrill and excitement of debugging when the API doesn't behave entirely as advertised!

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#26

Post by jefe78 »

ww520 wrote: post #21
cunac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't reproduce a dev/staging environment with the same traffic pattern, user behavior, and request load as to a production environment. Google bots won't crawl your dev/staging environment and you won't know its impact until you see it. DDOS attack won't happen in your dev/staging environment. Click fault won't happen on dev/staging. Developers probably shouldn't have root privilege on production but they need t…

No disrespect, but after a statement like this, "...deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment.", I wouldn't let you near my servers. That's not what a production server is for.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#28

Post by emmelaich »

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…

> Satire ...

The heading on the page "geek humor and other drivel" was also something of a hint.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#29

Post by johngalt »

Obviously the satirized sysadmin has never read TPOSANA. Automation and consistency are highly regarded in the sysadmin field. I've seen significantly more casual attitudes towards operational needs from the development side of the house.

DevOps was a term created because other titles have been watered down. Any real sysadmin has been automating deployments, updating, backups, and failovers for over a decade now. Don't claim we aren't sysadmins anymore now that it's getting interesting.

Re: "DevOps is ruining my craft"

#30

Post by Duff »

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…

Unless you're a really small org, devs and sysadmins have different roles and need to have distinct privileges to prevent them from stepping on each other. The bigger you get, the more important this is.

You have a few things from an internal control POV that you can do to help prevent "bad" things from happening. Examples include: privilege separation, change control, dev/test/prod environments, scripted deployments, automation, etc.

When devs bitch about not having the privileges they need, the biggest issue is usually communication. The SAs work for a different Director, and there is an adversarial relationship. Fix that, and most of your problems go away.

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