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System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

systeminit.com

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're not talking about that thing that ops people are talking about. We build reliable systems . You're talking about reliable software. Ops people come from the perspective that all software is inherently unreliable including your app, especially your app and have to work within those constraints. Terraform and Ansible look like gyroscopes compared to the build process of any modern software stack. We offe…

Oh boy, a whole pizza!

Bad for both vegans and gluten intolerant people. Also pizza parties are sooo 2006.

Nothing demotivates people like a half assed reward. If you want something never to get done, offer a bad carrot. If you want only one thing to get done and nothing ever again, offer a good reward but then make the recipient fight you to get it. I thought pizza parties were the worst, and then I got an award that was announced but not delivered, and spent almost eight hours over the next month poking people to give me my goddamned prize. It became a second job and at the end I ended up resenting the entire experience.

Later at another job when we in theory had a generous reimbursement process that was actually a ton of red tape, I had flashbacks to that incident.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#32

After reading this post, I've browsed the site. I'm not sure how this is anything but significantly worse than the current model? I've been around long enough to know that any "no code" style interface or GUI are typically the _problem_ not the solution. Regardless of the code they export, you end up with fat fingers, misclicks, forgotten UI paths to follow... Taking a software eng approach to shipping infra is a sta…

Well said. Click ops is the root of all evil, IME, unless you're a very small shop.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're not talking about that thing that ops people are talking about. We build reliable systems . You're talking about reliable software. Ops people come from the perspective that all software is inherently unreliable including your app, especially your app and have to work within those constraints. Terraform and Ansible look like gyroscopes compared to the build process of any modern software stack. We offe…

Oh boy, a whole pizza!

No, a full on everyone take the afternoon off catered food drinks to watch movies and play video games in our offices's bar paid for by the ops team personally.

Also don't assume we don't know our coworkers, when they first got to 8 in a row the slack channel looked like the Twitch chat of a popular streamer.

We have the buy-in from management that if it happens every day then it happens every day.

We are planning to change up the food if it ever happens again, pizza party is just a good title

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#34
post #8

>Doing “DevOps work” is unquestionably the worst part of building a modern application. It’s full of tiny papercuts, indignities we suffer in our toolchains, our feedback loops, and our software. It’s a city of brutalist buildings filled with sharp-edged couches pretending to be comfortable. Think of all the advances in how we interact with tools in other domains - then take a look at the way you build, deploy, and o…

> Even if you don't have my company's half-decade worth of example devops, you can do something easier,

If you are open to it, try configuring an azure function app to use GitHub in the deployment center. I heard actual gasps from certain team members when they saw it automatically push the GH action workflow file into master and kick off the job without any additional bullshit beyond the GH authentication ceremony and org/repo/branch selection.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#35
post #8

>Doing “DevOps work” is unquestionably the worst part of building a modern application. It’s full of tiny papercuts, indignities we suffer in our toolchains, our feedback loops, and our software. It’s a city of brutalist buildings filled with sharp-edged couches pretending to be comfortable. Think of all the advances in how we interact with tools in other domains - then take a look at the way you build, deploy, and o…

> I dunno, usually I find databases and migrations to be the hard part. For me, the following tools make that a joy: - Postgres as the database, which is very predictable and extremely reliable; - Migrations with Ruby on Rails, that have just the right balance between a convenient DSL and letting you write SQL when necessary; - The strong_migrations gem that catches in development unsafe commands to run in production…

We run the exact same setup, in my two years at the company we’ve only had one migration related issue and that was due to different minor versions of postgres between CI and staging. Now if postgis could get those official ARM docker images pushed i’d have nothing left to complain about.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#36

After reading this post, I've browsed the site. I'm not sure how this is anything but significantly worse than the current model? I've been around long enough to know that any "no code" style interface or GUI are typically the _problem_ not the solution. Regardless of the code they export, you end up with fat fingers, misclicks, forgotten UI paths to follow... Taking a software eng approach to shipping infra is a sta…

"Deploying every day isn't _that_ difficult" Just don't ever ask to roll back...

Why? Keep build artifacts and deploy any build you like. Do you have a state or dependency problem?

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#37
post #24

> Things like using source control, shared observability, feature flags, dark launching, continuous integration, and continuous delivery are widely considered best practices. I seriously want to know which places this is! I've been at 5 different companies, and I've never been a place where people don't look at me like I'm speaking French when I suggest dark launching a feature or introducing feature toggles. I've ye…

It's mainstream in Silicon Valley.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is (as a former dev, current ops) that the problem isn’t that dev and ops people aren’t speaking the same language, nor the tooling or processes. The problem comes from the management/business side. They hire devs and tell them that ship features as fast as you can. Also they hire ops guys and tell them that I want this whole thing super reliable, we can’t afford a minute downtime. In my opinion this is…

That’s definitely part of the dynamic. My biggest regret with automated testing is that software used to be a triumvirate of Quality, Dev, and Management, and when dev was fucking around they had two teams hitting them, and when Management was out of control, they had everyone mad at them. Get rid of QA and it’s Us vs Them and that worked briefly at the dawn of Agile but they got wise. OP’s should replace QA at that…

I agree. but having a QA group was hardly a magic bullet. most of the really talented contributors eschewed QA - even if they enjoyed it - because it meant being identified as a QA person for the rest of their career.

even if you could staff a competent group, they are often left with nothing to do while the devs 'work their magic'. and suddenly its 3 months past the original 'functionally complete' deadline, and QA is given 1 week to do what they .. oh, maybe 3 days really, to do what they need to do.

when it works its irreplaceable. when it doesn't its just a lot of noise and spend and flailing.

Re: System Initiative: Second Wave DevOps

#40
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Deploying every day isn't _that_ difficult" Just don't ever ask to roll back...

Why? Keep build artifacts and deploy any build you like. Do you have a state or dependency problem?

Same reason clocks shouldn't jump backwards, it breaks so many assumptions you end up with insanity. Do a revert commit so it's the old code in new clothing.
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