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The golden age of configuration languages

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Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#41

Post by WorldMaker »

jjoonathan wrote: post #31
npsimons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an old school sysadmin for a long time, the feeling I've always gotten from DevOps is that it is like anything else in the big ball of mud we call "computer science": a new generation re-inventing the wheel. To be sure, the scale is larger than ever before. But history is replete with "IT in the large". Just look at mainframes, quietly ticking away for decades on loads that people are re-discovering how to handle.…

Yeah, the rule always seems to be "two steps forward, one step back." I'm not convinced it's a hubris thing. Many of these "two steps forward, one step back" advancements happen because a commercial entity has intentionally blocked the tech tree from advancing in a certain direction that would undercut their position. The tree still advances, but it has to grow around the blockade, and that involves a certain amount…

I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional knowledge and have simply created a new version of your old workforce in their place. The hubris of course comes in accepting the masquerade that everything was really about innovation in the first place, rather than cost-cutting, and rather than rehiring for the old institutional knowledge, just reinventing all the wheels in the new situation with the hubris that it is vastly different than what came before (even though it isn't) because it is far more innovative (even though that is unlikely, because the businesses are still the same, the red tape the same, the expectations set by people still real familiar with the old predecessors, etc).

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#42

Post by closeparen »

tacker2000 wrote: post #15

Cloud infrastructure is certainly a big thing nowadays but AWS isnt really the grand solution to all problems. Its quite expensive, and in my case, since im not using any fancy stuff, have transferred all of my servers from EC2 to a more simple service (hetzner) and now pay less than half the cost. I think most businesses need to really evaluate this issue before blindly putting everything on AWS since it can really…

Most European businesses. EC2 and traditional dedicated server pricing are much closer together for US datacenters.

I think eventually we will see a European native cloud provider spring up with prices that make sense locally the same way EC2 prices make sense in America, and the big three cloud providers' pricing for EU datacenters will be driven towards Hetzner's pricing.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#43

Post by robertlagrant »

WorldMaker wrote: post #41
jjoonathan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the rule always seems to be "two steps forward, one step back." I'm not convinced it's a hubris thing. Many of these "two steps forward, one step back" advancements happen because a commercial entity has intentionally blocked the tech tree from advancing in a certain direction that would undercut their position. The tree still advances, but it has to grow around the blockade, and that involves a certain amount…

I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional k…

Automating repeatable things to remove the need for some institutional knowledge is a good thing.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#44

Post by closeparen »

>The need to handle application infrastructure (I see this different than managing core business services infrastructure like AD, email, finance systems, etc.)

This point goes by quickly but it's important. One of the biggest factors in my employer's relative reasonableness is IT's corporate network and engineering's production environment have nothing to do with each other. Separate teams, datacenters, stacks, and cultures.

We still have a group that will write a change management plan in Microsoft Word to work on the corporate finance Oracle instance during a scheduled downtime window. But I can release my new API endpoint to customers whenever I want (after code review) using a contemporary CI/CD workflow.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#45

Post by 0xCMP »

Author should check out https://arc.codes and https://begin.com because I think that's what they're looking for.

I would err to say that Pulumi is not and should not really be used for this, but I was just thinking of how annoying it is setup some open source projects in AWS (especially if they're made for it or any other specific env) and that having the Pulumi config, at least some basic modules, would make it so much easier to get started.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#46

Post by WorldMaker »

robertlagrant wrote: post #43
WorldMaker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional k…

Automating repeatable things to remove the need for some institutional knowledge is a good thing.

Definitely. I'm not claiming at all that it didn't necessarily come from a good place originally or that it hasn't had good ideas, just that the hype cycle around the kernels of good ideas became it's own demon that lost sight of the institutional knowledge forest for some of the most easily automated milling of institutional knowledge trees, and were surprised what happen when the forest was a clear cut field strewn with detritus and they had lost more than they expected in the culling. (I think that metaphor works? It sounds good at least.)

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#47

Post by calpaterson »

dfgdghdf wrote: post #36
calpaterson wrote: post #18

This barely readable webpage notwithstanding (my advice: use firefox's reader mode to remove the CSS) I am sad about how the devops community changed from being about practices (like "don't throw code over the wall" and "release often [for various reasons]") to seemingly being wholly about technology. A huge proportion of people "doing devops" (whatever that is supposed to mean) are in fact really just lobbying for t…

I agree that there is a lot of shilling and resume-driven-development going on, but there has also been genuine progress. I would hate to manage infrastructure without Terraform, for example.

I don't know, I kind of hate managing infrastructure with Terraform. Buggering around with it's state files to move resources between files is error prone and comes up often because as with any software project: you do need to refactor after your first burst of work on it.

I also dislike like the patterns it encourages or a the "run loads of infra!" culture that comes with it.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#48

Post by calpaterson »

jnwatson wrote: post #30
calpaterson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the truth is, almost no organisations ever consider cost before they get started. That's one of the purposes of "cloud credits" that AWS/GCP/etc give out to new companies and projects that they are very successful in that. Even worse, organisations rarely do it even once they're up and running and spending large sums - and even then I have never seen the impetus for cost control ever come from within the technol…

You could say that cloud companies exploit company dysfunction. That engineering is usually not incentivized (until too late) to keep costs down is the key to this whole mess. I've seen the pendulum swing the other way, too. At former large employers, I've had to cobble together (shadow IT) servers from discarded equipment because the process of getting cloud boxes allocated was so onerous.

> You could say that cloud companies exploit company dysfunction.

Like every large software vendor, yes, it's moderately profitable to produce good software and sell it but it is much, much more profitable to abuse bad procurement practice.

Shadow IT is a sad state of affairs but at least it builds the skills and culture to economise on computing cost.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#49

Post by generalizations »

WorldMaker wrote: post #41
jjoonathan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the rule always seems to be "two steps forward, one step back." I'm not convinced it's a hubris thing. Many of these "two steps forward, one step back" advancements happen because a commercial entity has intentionally blocked the tech tree from advancing in a certain direction that would undercut their position. The tree still advances, but it has to grow around the blockade, and that involves a certain amount…

I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional k…

> you lost a whole bunch of institutional knowledge

That also sounds like an opportunity for the old guard to write down what they know before it's (they're) gone. I wonder if any of them have, and if so where.

Re: The golden age of configuration languages

#50

Post by npsimons »

robertlagrant wrote: post #43
WorldMaker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional k…

Automating repeatable things to remove the need for some institutional knowledge is a good thing.

This I will give to DevOps - it's hyper focus on automation, change management and repeatability are all good things. As someone with a leg in each domain (software developer by day, system administrator by night), I've really felt that both areas could learn a lot from each other. These days with version control being as quick and easy as it is, there's no reason not to use it for everything. Configuration as code is immensely powerful. And repeatability to eliminate "well, it works on my machine" is fucking brilliant.

But there still needs to be documentation. The why must always be explained, even with the most readable of code, that can only layout the what and the how.

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