5 ms·

Ops School Curriculum (2012)

103 points by LinuxBender 8y ago

nerdkid93 8y ago
It's an OPS tutorial, but their SSL cert is invalid. :/ One of the authors needs to update their settings in ReadTheDocs.
stoic 8y ago
Wow, this is really great! Soft Skills 201 could be a book unto itself, nice to see this stuff being discussed. In general, I think the soft skills sections should get a lot more promotion (it's buried so far down the sidebar I had to scroll!). The technical stuff is already well-documented elsewhere, but nobody ever told me how important being politically savvy was in this niche until I had already blown both feet off several times.
eropple 8y ago
(edit: looks like, as per a comment further down, a lot of this is five-ish years old; the decisions made in its writing/presentation make a lot more sense in that light. Leaving comment for posterity.) So I get the overall goal here, but reading this, this feels like somebody's trying to fight the last war. > Since the early 90’s, operations engineers have been in high demand. As a result, these positions often offer high salaries and long term job security. ...because most of the control surfaces offered minimal automation and there were many fewer options for management. This isn't even a "well, AWS/GCP/Azure will eat your lunch" thing, it's a "the robots can do most of this already" thing. There are still roles for network engineers, large-scale datacenter management, and that sort of thing--but this "curriculum" reads as very...hands-on...when a holistic, automation-first approach is overwhelmingly preferred in industry (outside of the trailing edge, where those high salaries and that stability aren't nearly as common). Again: not saying "use the cloud, datacenters don't matter." But I'm not sure that this encompasses what "ops" typically means (as opposed to "IT", which is itself becoming a largely automatable and automated function, or "devops", which will get there sooner than later) and I'm very unsure that places that will still be dealing with data centers in ten years, instead of outsourcing it, will benefit much from juniors with this skillset instead of one built around software definition and a pervasively automation-first mindset.
- gowld 8y ago
  What happens in 20 years when all the professionals in the industry have no understanding of what their robots do?
  - eropple 8y ago
    Then they learn how the robots work? Because their brains work and because they have the underlying plasticity of skillset to pick it up? I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with hardware, I learned it. And it was easier because the first question was always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    They become enslaved, then there is a great war, then everyone starts over and learns everything. I could be confusing this with Dune. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  courses like this tend to be less of a function of what would be the most useful for the profession as a whole and more of a function of what someone would need to know to get a job. these skills are definitely things people would need to know to get an SRE/DevOps/Ops/IT job in 2019. (I understand that those 4 jobs are not the same.)
  - eropple 8y ago
    Thing is, though, if somebody came to me even at my current place (which is very much a trailing-edge shop) with this as the majority of their priors, I probably couldn't hire them. Automation is not the future, automation is the present. The amount of very hand-o-matic stuff being suggested out of this document is inimical to one's employability in this field. Understanding how to systematize and automate is a more employable skill than having a very high-level understanding of, say, Active Directory.
mverwijs 8y ago
From 2012.
argd678 8y ago
This lacks the most critical part of ops in designing systems that are repeatable and debugable, discrete build steps on a time line. You can’t reason about any complex system without some core logic and this is most absent in operations.
- leetrout 8y ago
  That is a very accurate, succinct comment. I’m going to steal this when arguing for Terraform.
incomplete 8y ago
i just let the opsschool author know about this post. he'll be on here soon! :)
- avleenvig 8y ago
  Thanks incomplete :)
avleenvig 8y ago
Hi everyone! I really appreciate the feedback here. It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back then, we were barely starting to think about containers at scale. The cloud was a thing for sure, but the main contributors were mostly working in places with physical infrastructure. Over the years we've discussed how we can reboot the project. There is always interest and desire, but time is hard to find :) The project will stay up as it is because we still feel there is value in learning the basics. Over time the understanding of what is "basics" is evolving. This year I'm chairing the SREcon conference in Singapore. The program has a "Core Principles" track which talks about things like deep dives on linux memory management, database indices, how BGP works, etc. There is a lot of desire to still have these super deep dives into underlying technology. I hope we can find a way to turn this into a stronger curriculum with labs and teaching exercises one day :) - One of the original OpsSchool founders
- znpy 8y ago
  Hey, thank you! As someone who has been practicing a lot in an 'old school' environment (many of our customers still run our software the old way) I honestly think this still is a very good curriculum. Actually I think many of the things listed, people underlook at them. I've seen with my eyes digging very deep on "cloud" and "devops" stuff fail completely (and spectacularly, I must admit) ad very basic things. I'll be digging deeper into opschool.org, is there a way to have an offline copy (besides running httrack) ?
  - znpy 8y ago
    replying to myself: http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-school/downloads/htmlzip/latest/ http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-school/downloads/htmlzip...
- wyclif 8y ago
  I just wanted to say that I've found the OpsSchool documentation here valuable, and I still think it has a lot of value. I would encourage you to reboot and update it. I've had the site bookmarked for a long time and it's one I've returned to many times over the years. Back in the day, the way a sysadmin (now "DevOps engineer") learned all this information was by reading the paper manuals which sometimes came in binders. I feel like there is still a lot of value in "deep dive" information no matter how pervasive automation becomes in our industry.
saifulwebid 8y ago
I laughed at how the "MS Windows fundamentals 101" is blank. Because no operations engineer should use MS Windows? :see_no_evil:

103 points by LinuxBender 8y ago

It's an OPS tutorial, but their SSL cert is invalid. :/ One of the authors needs to update their settings in ReadTheDocs.

stoic 8y ago

Wow, this is really great! Soft Skills 201 could be a book unto itself, nice to see this stuff being discussed. In general, I think the soft skills sections should get a lot more promotion (it's buried so far down the sidebar I had to scroll!). The technical stuff is already well-documented elsewhere, but nobody ever told me how important being politically savvy was in this niche until I had already blown both feet off several times.

eropple 8y ago

(edit: looks like, as per a comment further down, a lot of this is five-ish years old; the decisions made in its writing/presentation make a lot more sense in that light. Leaving comment for posterity.) So I get the overall goal here, but reading this, this feels like somebody's trying to fight the last war. > Since the early 90’s, operations engineers have been in high demand. As a result, these positions often offer high salaries and long term job security. ...because most of the control surfaces offered minimal automation and there were many fewer options for management. This isn't even a "well, AWS/GCP/Azure will eat your lunch" thing, it's a "the robots can do most of this already" thing. There are still roles for network engineers, large-scale datacenter management, and that sort of thing--but this "curriculum" reads as very...hands-on...when a holistic, automation-first approach is overwhelmingly preferred in industry (outside of the trailing edge, where those high salaries and that stability aren't nearly as common). Again: not saying "use the cloud, datacenters don't matter." But I'm not sure that this encompasses what "ops" typically means (as opposed to "IT", which is itself becoming a largely automatable and automated function, or "devops", which will get there sooner than later) and I'm very unsure that places that will still be dealing with data centers in ten years, instead of outsourcing it, will benefit much from juniors with this skillset instead of one built around software definition and a pervasively automation-first mindset.

gowld 8y ago
What happens in 20 years when all the professionals in the industry have no understanding of what their robots do?
- eropple 8y ago
  Then they learn how the robots work? Because their brains work and because they have the underlying plasticity of skillset to pick it up? I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with hardware, I learned it. And it was easier because the first question was always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  They become enslaved, then there is a great war, then everyone starts over and learns everything. I could be confusing this with Dune. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
femiagbabiaka 8y ago
courses like this tend to be less of a function of what would be the most useful for the profession as a whole and more of a function of what someone would need to know to get a job. these skills are definitely things people would need to know to get an SRE/DevOps/Ops/IT job in 2019. (I understand that those 4 jobs are not the same.)
- eropple 8y ago
  Thing is, though, if somebody came to me even at my current place (which is very much a trailing-edge shop) with this as the majority of their priors, I probably couldn't hire them. Automation is not the future, automation is the present. The amount of very hand-o-matic stuff being suggested out of this document is inimical to one's employability in this field. Understanding how to systematize and automate is a more employable skill than having a very high-level understanding of, say, Active Directory.

mverwijs 8y ago

From 2012.

argd678 8y ago

This lacks the most critical part of ops in designing systems that are repeatable and debugable, discrete build steps on a time line. You can’t reason about any complex system without some core logic and this is most absent in operations.

leetrout 8y ago
That is a very accurate, succinct comment. I’m going to steal this when arguing for Terraform.

incomplete 8y ago

i just let the opsschool author know about this post. he'll be on here soon! :)

avleenvig 8y ago
Thanks incomplete :)

avleenvig 8y ago

Hi everyone! I really appreciate the feedback here. It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back then, we were barely starting to think about containers at scale. The cloud was a thing for sure, but the main contributors were mostly working in places with physical infrastructure. Over the years we've discussed how we can reboot the project. There is always interest and desire, but time is hard to find :) The project will stay up as it is because we still feel there is value in learning the basics. Over time the understanding of what is "basics" is evolving. This year I'm chairing the SREcon conference in Singapore. The program has a "Core Principles" track which talks about things like deep dives on linux memory management, database indices, how BGP works, etc. There is a lot of desire to still have these super deep dives into underlying technology. I hope we can find a way to turn this into a stronger curriculum with labs and teaching exercises one day :) - One of the original OpsSchool founders

znpy 8y ago
Hey, thank you! As someone who has been practicing a lot in an 'old school' environment (many of our customers still run our software the old way) I honestly think this still is a very good curriculum. Actually I think many of the things listed, people underlook at them. I've seen with my eyes digging very deep on "cloud" and "devops" stuff fail completely (and spectacularly, I must admit) ad very basic things. I'll be digging deeper into opschool.org, is there a way to have an offline copy (besides running httrack) ?
- znpy 8y ago
  replying to myself: http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-school/downloads/htmlzip/latest/ http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-school/downloads/htmlzip...
wyclif 8y ago
I just wanted to say that I've found the OpsSchool documentation here valuable, and I still think it has a lot of value. I would encourage you to reboot and update it. I've had the site bookmarked for a long time and it's one I've returned to many times over the years. Back in the day, the way a sysadmin (now "DevOps engineer") learned all this information was by reading the paper manuals which sometimes came in binders. I feel like there is still a lot of value in "deep dive" information no matter how pervasive automation becomes in our industry.

saifulwebid 8y ago

I laughed at how the "MS Windows fundamentals 101" is blank. Because no operations engineer should use MS Windows? :see_no_evil: