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"SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#71

Post by benfortuna »

dijit wrote: post #16
benfortuna wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to also look into why DevOps became a thing. Because devs were sick of the BS dealing with Ops teams (want a server, that will take 6 months to provision). So devs decided they could do it themselves (with better tools).

That tends to happen when your IT team is a cost center, they had no resources on standby. Now you pay AWS anywhere from 5-11x more for an instance, but you still have an ops team managing it (by some name). If you had given even 20% of that investment to the sysadmins you would have had an equivalent system. AWS just weaponised this short-sighted thinking that was killing ops teams.

But if AWS originates from the ops teams of Amazon, then perhaps they were just doing Ops better than everyone else. They chose not to be just a cost centre, and find ways to become better.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#72

Post by drewcoo »

benfortuna wrote: post #69
pjmlp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already had such automation tools under system administration umbrella. What do we think we were using Perl for?

Scripting is not in the same league as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc. Automation at scale required the development of tools like these.

Not scale in terms of your company scaling. Only scale in terms of number of companies using the same off the shelf tooling.

The difference with those tools is that they were off the rack and not bespoke. There were plenty of bespoke systems before, used in fewer places because bespoke systems are expensive.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#73

Post by dijit »

benfortuna wrote: post #71
dijit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That tends to happen when your IT team is a cost center, they had no resources on standby. Now you pay AWS anywhere from 5-11x more for an instance, but you still have an ops team managing it (by some name). If you had given even 20% of that investment to the sysadmins you would have had an equivalent system. AWS just weaponised this short-sighted thinking that was killing ops teams.

But if AWS originates from the ops teams of Amazon, then perhaps they were just doing Ops better than everyone else. They chose not to be just a cost centre, and find ways to become better.

That’s certainly an opinion.

From what I recall it was AWS developers trying to solve object storage, and EC2 came later. Not about ops.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#74

Post by 28304283409234 »

znpy wrote: post #57

I got the SRE book by google, and read the whole thing, cover to cover. Companies want SRE people but aren't willing to give SRE empowerment and authority. So companies do what companies to: take a regular team of operations people and slap the SRE term on it, and call it a day. And it doesn't work, of course. --- Regarding the empowerment & authority: according to "the book", SREs often play the role of "launch coor…

As companies did with DevOps.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#75

Post by evanelias »

dijit wrote: post #2

People need operations staff, people don't like operations staff and keep trying to treat them like developers. But, operations staff do and have always developed software, just internal software for glue or orchestration, and they work differently to regular software developers in that their customers are usually themselves to meet an internal objective of reliability, stability or ease-of-use for developers. It's i…

> It's interesting to me, because I'm a bit longer lived it seems and have been tied to industry for a long time

> The author is experiencing the exact same thing I did over a decade ago

> the author will just need to alter her vernacular

If I'm not mistaken, the author is older than you and has been in the industry longer. She's complaining about this topic specifically because she was a Google SRE back when SRE was first becoming a thing.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#76

Post by spc476 »

buttocks wrote: post #46
dimitar wrote: post #7

you're going to be the "ops bitch" for the "real" programmers Rachel is spot on about what is often wrong with IT culture; "typecasting" people for someone's convenience or to get a fancy title leads to learned helplessness and dissmissing other people's expertise and interests. I rather we all try to keep things simple and encourage people to be well-rounded engineers.

Yet she keeps calling ops people “monkeys.”

As a developer, I've had to tell "ops" how syslog() works. Also, as a developer, I've had "ops" bitch because we had different config files for the service. Yes, because the service is geographically redundant, and each site had different IP address! And I, the developer, have maintained, and continue to maintain, the configuration file! Checked into your ops repo. You (ops) have never had to maintain it at all!

I've also been on the other side of the wall, as ops, having to tell the developers why the keep seeing zombie processes on the server. Because the developers had no experience with Unix signals and having to wait on child processes. And again, about how syslog() works.

It goes both ways.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#77

Post by kkfx »

Management hate classic operation because it's too powerful, it's the operation part of the nervous system of a company, operation can't be managed nor segmented by the management, as a result many try to do their best to delete sysadmins from the scene.

Results are that most end up on someone else system with some form of operation. Meaning the cloud. Now that costs skyrocket, issues piling up, no one seems to been able to create a damn full infra well, the push deflate.

We have experienced many similar trends:

- full stack virtualization on x86, sold as the future, a super-duper simplification, actually a way to allow third party selling pre-made images to those who have no operation or do not own the bare metal (VPS etc);

- when people realize how big the overhead is paravirtualization became an old-new trend, mostly with k8s, now this model start to creak and the push toward owning back the infra and the iron start to be noisy

I expect in a decade a mainstream NixOS/Guix System move as we had with Ansible/Salt before, the old CFEngine much before and so on, in 20 years probably companies will own back their machine room with a Plan 9 -alike model to just get redundancies and extra temporary resources.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#78

Post by telotortium »

lr4444lr wrote: post #41

Ops people are cost centers. They can display their wizardry in blog posts until they are blue in the face, but except for those few companies with an incredibly large moat whose main profit is just raw traffic or high uptime (and how many companies like that can maintain that moat indefinitely anyway), engineers not actually building or directly improving product will always be cost centers. It brings me no joy to s…

Even as a Google SRE who came in with a Systems Engineering focus (i.e., sysadmin), I found it useful to qualify for, and become, a SRE-SWE so that I could also add Software Engineer to my résumé (I wrote enough code that I should get that title). Big and scaling companies still find the combination of sysadmin and software engineering skills extremely valuable, but you do need to emphasize that you are a skilled software engineer as well.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#79

Post by attendant3446 »

jfindley wrote: post #54
joshstrange wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t started trying to hire for this position yet, it’s been something I’ve been thinking of for a while though. Right a small number of developers, myself included, are on call and I’d like to reduce that a bit or just share the burden. My goal isn’t to throw crap over the fence and say “make it work” but rather empower someone to make maintaining and growing our platform their main goal. The developers (again,…

> Infra/Ops and programming are two different mindsets [...] HARD disagree on this. I've done both. Most of the really excellent programmers I've worked with have, at least a little. You can't write highly reliable networking software without a deep understanding of how networking actually works. You can't write highly performing software without a deep understanding of the infrastructure and hardware it's running on…

For me it's very similar, I was in dev, now I'm in ops and I can easily switch back. But to think that all good programmers can do infra is a falsehood.

I've met so many developers who don't even know how computers really work. They're good at a particular tech stack and do their job very well, but they can't do much else. Let alone infra.

Personally, I agree that it's two different mindsets, but sometimes they can overlap.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#80

Post by attendant3446 »

Chilinot wrote: post #28
joshstrange wrote: post #15

Honest question, what would you call a role that: * Is on call * Manages internal software (grafana, Prometheus, salt stack, etc) * is the first line of defense for issues in the field, works with support and the engineering team to handle problems * Manages a distributed fleet of servers (uses off the self and/or custom code to do so) * Builds internal tools/automations to improve the reliability of our platform and…

"Platform Engineer" has started to grow as a name for pretty much this. An engineer that builds the platform that all things run on. For example, the k8s clusters, the observability stack, has on-call, and builds the internal tools and automations (called the IDP, or internal developer platform).

Apparently not everyone gets it. I once went to an AWS meetup and introduced myself as a "platform engineer", but not everyone understood what I did =)

But personally, I like "platform engineer" more than "ops".

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