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"Devops is on the rise primarily due to realization that there is a big gap between developing end-user systems and bare-bones systems administration" That's t
by strlen 17y ago
"Devops is on the rise primarily due to realization that there is a big gap between developing end-user systems and bare-bones systems administration"
That's the key take away here! I've held such a role in ~10,000+ node environment. I've since moved on to development, but I've been trying to drive this point to start-ups for years, but apparently most still think that:
1) Operations means installing an OS on a machine, doing backups (and may be occasionally checking how many threads are running in the application server)
2) As we no longer have to admin bare iron, start-ups do not need operations.
The hiring is done accordingly: the idea is to contract-out/outsource/reluctantly hire one or two "IT-type" admins whose goal is merely to (in a reactive fashion) respond to outages as they happen and (manually) provision servers and networking gear.
Nothing could be more wrong. With the move to commodity and virtualized commodity hardware, running operating systems that are geared (originally) towards developers rather than sys admins (e.g., Linux vs. Solaris or FreeBSD -- this isn't a stab at the latter two, it's rather a comment to how much more admin-friendly theses OSes are) the assumption should be that unless there's "lights out"-style automation in place, outages are going to be the norm rather than exception.
- Periodic 17y agoI'm a bit confused about your last sentence. Are you saying that the dev OSes will cause more outages, but we can automated that they won't be major? The first thought that popped into my head while reading this article was how ZFS snapshots would work for versioning system deployments. Though I'm sure that's snapshots at a lower level than most people would actually use.
- strlen 17y ago> I'm a bit confused about your last sentence. Are you saying that the dev OSes will cause more outages, but we can automated that they won't be major? I am saying that the "dev OSes" (really, I just meant Linux), if not automated, are difficult to manage. However, in a "worse is better" sense that means there's wealth of operations tools available for them (e.g., puppet, chef, bcfg2). Linux administrators are extremely used to working with these tools and developing their own. At present web-scale (i.e., no longer a few Ultra-2s for front-end and an E10K for database) if there's no automation, outages are going to happen as result of routine failures (e.g., database master -- or Hadoop namenode -- goes down, there's no automation to fail it over). ZFS snapshots are awesome (I've had a chance to deploy a project to a Solaris environment with ZFS -- and snapshots meant much less worries about data loss). Unfortunately, the only choices for ZFS are FreeBSD and Solaris (I wouldn't try ZFS-Fuse). However, FreeBSD provides no easy way to do many things automatically that are possible in Linux (e.g., no fully un-attended installation, although that's less of a problem with virtualization). Solaris has issues of its own and unfortunately, presently, the biggest issue isn't even technical.