3 ms·

Are you seriously telling me that you went from infrastructure as code to doing things by hand!?

• xenophonf 6y ago
  We were always doing things by hand. I was the only one doing any kind of IT automation, and I failed to account for the learning curve of my tooling when trying to expand its use. At least now, the entire team—not just me—is doing a better job of documenting what they're doing by hand. The reality is that devops toolchains are really complex. For example, to use SaltStack the way I had things set up, it meant learning: - SaltStack's domain-specific programming language, which amounts to writing Python in YAML - their macro preprocessor, Jinja, which has completely different syntax and semantics than their DSL - a programming text editor that supports YAML and Jinja - Git and GitHub - secrets management (and there were huge risks here) - the general concepts of IT automation and infrastructure-as-code Learning (never mind teaching) that tech stack is really hard. For example, the Google IT Automation with Python certification on Coursera is an 8-month-long course. That's just one bullet point on the above list, and that list doesn't include all the things I wanted to do on top of SaltStack, namely the continuous integration/continuous testing stuff, which would involve learning: - the Chef InSpec DSL, which is based on Ruby - branching and tagging - release engineering - test-driven development as a software engineering methodology - software engineering methodology in general We were struggling with even just writing good documentation, but there I was asking everyone to write good code. That's orders of magnitude harder. It was too much, like asking somebody to run a marathon without any training. I don't care how fit you are. That's just not going to happen.