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What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

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Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#71

Post by pts_ »

freehunter wrote: post #48
solatic wrote: post #47

Great DevOps practitioners are rarer than 10x engineers. It's the combination of: * Systems knowledge through the lens of Conway's Law: what does an ideal even look like in terms of organizational efficiency * Leadership to get disparate teams in an organization to cooperate instead of compete * Technical competency to help disparate teams adopt the principles, because telling people on the fence to "go Google it" is…

At my day job I have a "devops" guy who is all-in on "devops". By which I mean he wants everything run through a CI/CD workflow, committed into change control, with passing unit tests, and tasks passing through a Jenkins pipeline. Did I mention we are information security consultants and work in neither dev nor ops? Yeah he wants our powerpoint slides checked into change control. I'm not joking.

At least put it in a CMS. Managing docs is so absent in workflows.

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#72

Post by 1337shadow »

hosh wrote: post #27
1337shadow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are rare because it takes like 15 yrs of day and night hacking & learning from books that range from software to sales, through system & networking and communication, and found ways to practice, not something many people are both willing and able to do.

They are rare because the primary skill of a devops person is creative problem solving in an unknown situation and with unfamiliar tooling. You are plumber, not a cowboy or farmer. While I have some deep knowledge in a few areas, most of the work I do has a lot more to do with researching tools, tracing down problems, and figuring out solutions that do not always appear on Google or StackOverflow. That mindset has al…

I would also add that I consider this practice as a triangle: science, art and sports.

Science: because a scientific protocol is to be used when making and testing code, to understand every detail, and because it's based on logic

Art: because code should first be written for another human (or you in 6 months) to read and understand, that it works or not is secondary,

Sports: because you need everyday to be in the retrospective of your past performance and try to improve it

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#73

Post by yadayada123 »

1337shadow wrote: post #16

"DevOps" used to be a methodology where a Dev and an Ops share a same goal of delivering value into production, at least, that's in the book I have read. A sort of extension of the Lean System where workers from different areas share a common goal of delivering value to the final customer (in production), the same card may require a backend dev, frontend dev, and an ops to share the goal to take this card from idea t…

lolz

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#74

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

emmelaich wrote: post #69
goatinaboat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or “a developer that does on-call” I’m being facetious. Sysadmins always wrote scripts and developers always got called at home.

The best always did. Many of the rest did, but not high quality scripts, and only in shell; not perl or python or tcl or ... The lower rungs of sysadmin were happy to point and click on guis and lug and plug hardware.

Yes, "DevOps" is basically an attempt to weed out the best sysadmins from the rest in the job market, because if you look for 'an experienced sysadmin' you'd usually find a guy who laid cables and replaced mice for 1000 Windows workstations instead of 10.

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#75

Post by brew-hacker »

Personally - I would consider some of the best DevOps engineers as the best generalist engineers around.

DevOps engineers are thought as limited to CI/CD or infrastructure management. I would 100% consider them to be able to pick up development and understand the full stack (including networking, database management, etc.).

Kudos to you and others that expand "DevOps" to be more than just a simple shift of SysAdmins to Cloud.

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#76

Post by bionsystem »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #42

In practice, and talking from my experience, unless you're one of the lucky few this is what it really means to do DevOps in 2019: - Forget what the books said, theory, semantics and idealism. You are a DevOps Engineer, working in a platform specific team. - You deal with Jenkins or similar, and consult other teams or developers to write scripts for it, or worse, do the work for them since they're too busy doing actu…

You forgot :

- deal with management who wont pay for a support license because the product is "Open Source"

- spend weeks troubleshooting dependancy hells for applications with no documentation and no architecture and listening devs tell you that "it works on their laptop" (but somehow they can't give you a working requirements.txt or equivalent)

- the immense pleasure of using apt, pip, npm, and all of their cousins behind corporate proxies

- deal with information security departments who have no idea what you are doing, and thus feel threatened and block all of your initiatives by default

- deal with infrastructure departments who are building their own internal cloud infrastructure, with no budget (hello again free "Open Source"), and won't label it "prod-ready" after 4 or 5 years while support for their legacy is dropped

- convince management that they may have to give some training to their 60 "integrators" and 80 "exploit" teams that are still copying and pasting shell scripts from Word documents written last decade or earlier

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#77

Post by tn890 »

NicolasCornwall wrote: post #49

I'm a freelance DevOps consultant working in Germany I consider my duty as 50% as consultant regarding DevOps culture and agile culture and to 50% "building pipelines and all that automation stuff" This shows quite clearly how DevOps as a term is used in Germany. Either the fusion of responsibility of Dev and Ops is meant or just someone who does this modern cloudy stuff One thing I really like in the DevOps space is…

I've been hopping from one DevOps role to another for the past 4-5 years and I've been meaning to get into freelancing recently.

However, in my experience, I find that projects are incredibly hard to acquire, especially if it's your first freelance gig.

Do you happen to have any advice for me on how to get into DevOps freelancing, particularly how to acquire projects?

Thanks

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#79

Post by hermitdev »

hermitdev wrote: post #67
TurboHaskal wrote: post #42

In practice, and talking from my experience, unless you're one of the lucky few this is what it really means to do DevOps in 2019: - Forget what the books said, theory, semantics and idealism. You are a DevOps Engineer, working in a platform specific team. - You deal with Jenkins or similar, and consult other teams or developers to write scripts for it, or worse, do the work for them since they're too busy doing actu…

Personally, I don't like DrvOps, either. I think it does a disservice to both devs and ops. At current job, its kind of frustrating in that ee act as if we're doing dev ops, but as a dev, when a (my) job fails, ops doesn't trust me to either abort or restart the job. So we've got all the buzzwords, none of the benefit. Typical support call: ops calls me with the failed job. I log in, take a look see; tell them to dow…

Ugh, I just read my comment, and I apologize for all of the typos. Wrote it on my phone, and it's too late to edit. Sorry.

Re: What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

#80

Post by znpy »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #42

In practice, and talking from my experience, unless you're one of the lucky few this is what it really means to do DevOps in 2019: - Forget what the books said, theory, semantics and idealism. You are a DevOps Engineer, working in a platform specific team. - You deal with Jenkins or similar, and consult other teams or developers to write scripts for it, or worse, do the work for them since they're too busy doing actu…

A lot of devops positions look like “a sysadmin to babysit developers”.

I’ll be starting a devops role next month, hopefully it will not be like this.

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