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Grumpykins here. I think the term "Modern devops" sort of nails it but not quite how you used it. Most departmental/enterprise sys admins/engineers of lore th
by seorphates 8y ago
Grumpykins here. I think the term "Modern devops" sort of nails it but not quite how you used it. Most departmental/enterprise sys admins/engineers of lore that had even the slightest necessity for life outside the box scaled anything resembling automation to its breaking points. Combined with knowing and serving the reasons for their existence - developers, users etc., and devops is nothing new - it is now simply the necessary manifestation of progress at scale (albeit positively devoured by managers speaking business, not entirely unlike "agile").
"Use what works" definitely presents a lot more choices these days and likely will forever more.
"Use what works well" is something different where "well" implies helpful, dependable, predictable, manageable and so on that will continue to scale with your needs. Only breaking things down the "old-school" way will lead towards success, stability, security and life outside the box.
Good devops is still, primarily, good engineers engineering good things, for themselves and others.
Granted the article is from 2015 but my impression is author is not just cranky, but scared.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoA good sysadmin would not look like they are doing much work (everything is humming along and can self-heal minus physical problems), but a good devops person is constantly busy.
- segmondy 8y agoGreat sysadmins get fired unless they learn to pretend to look busy. They automate everything till they have nothing to do.
- Intermernet 8y agoLogging is your friend here. You can spend days scrolling through logs, doing an occasional grep and making disapproving noises occasionally. Bonus points for developing some graphs for the next meeting.
- shakna 8y agoMy introduction to statistics was learned as a sysadmin, trying to show that I was doing 'stuff'.
- seorphates 8y agoI sort of agree but a good sysadmin was never idle on the inside. I'm seeing good devops people getting worked well beyond what I'd consider reasonable expectations i.e. "Oh, look, you can do everything! Here's everything!". They're being perverted into a role having a full load of pure operations with shit for processes (and, often, systems) and an expectation that you have time to automate and shore up all the shit and technical debt accumulated since. Can most good or even extraordinary developers simultaneously be elbow deep on a dozen unrelated products and actually get reasonable traction? I can barely keep one glass castle together, myself.
- AndrewUnmuted 8y agoI think a lot of data engineers and transcoding folks would have similar reports. But you’re right; the problem with DevOps is the reach of their usefulness. If your whole company is built on code, your DevOps team will always be overworked and under appreciated.
- piva00 8y agoThis is exactly my sentiment and why I moved away from SRE and back to SWE. I felt busy all the time doing development of tools and infrastructure while at the same time aggregating the role of operations. Never having the time to properly finish a project that I was proud of delivering, turning those into services so we could leverage self-servicing was a dream that most of the time never happened, we were left with half-done systems requiring tons of manual intervention (lots of toil) while having to move fast to the next thing...
- hennsen 8y agoCan you elaborate that? Whats a “devops person” for you and what keeps them busy? And why cant they have systems that hum along self-healingly automated?
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoMost of the tools of the modern "devops person" are undergoing constant development themselves. So, not only is there the responsibility of creating this self-healing automated infrastructure, but keeping tools and resume up-to-date, as well.
- nunez 8y agoAgreed. DevOps has been a thing for a long time. The funny thing is that the core of the DevOps philosophy —- to unite development and ops through code —- is still a rarity. SO MANY big companies have entire departments for DevOps that are basically either developers doing release management sysadmins writing pseudo code for infrastructure while making it somehow less accessible to development teams.
- hennsen 8y agoDevOps is uniting dev and ops through code? I believe it’s at first and most important to unite them through good(early, often, honest, etc.) communication and collaboration instead of “you broke x” and “you have to fix y” as well as “this is the other (dev or ops depending who says it) departments fault/task is the most important thing in DevOps. The code is just a tool to make this collaboration easier / automate it where the other things already happened and all understood they work on the same goal and not as enemies.