4 ms·

That should be the exception, rather than the rule.

anamexis 6y ago
And it is deeply frustrating when you run up against one of these exceptions and need to wade through some bureaucracy before you can investigate further.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  the point people are trying to make is that if you are at the scale where a kernel bug or an nginx bug is borking your app, it's not the developers job to go poking around the system for a fix. It's the devops/infra people's job. In my world, if you want to investigate an nginx bug... "docker run -it nginx:latest /bin/bash" and go for it... find the issue, reproduce it, then fix it in the pipeline and deploy again. You didn't touch production at all. If your debugging relies on being ON PRODUCTION, you don't suffer from the scale you need to be on there in the first place.
  - jclulow 6y ago
    Not all bugs are sufficiently cheaply reproducible outside the environment in which they are observed. It seems silly to tie your hands behind your back when you could just inspect what the computer is doing and then fix it.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Why can't your developers be "devops people"?
    - paranoidrobot 6y ago
      I've already written a response to this elsewhere in the thread, but developers are not all equal. You can't hire twenty developers that all have the same skill/inclinations, the same interests, the same experience. That's not to say that a DevOps Engineer is some super 10x rockstar developer - no, they're going to have the same variations on skill, interests, experience, etc. It depends on your environment, but there's so much different tech once you count the entire stack, that I don't think it's reasonable to expect any one person to be an expert on all of it, or even a lot of it.
      - shawnz 6y ago
        Sure, but "not all developers can be devops engineers" doesn't necessarily imply "none of your developers should have server access".
        paranoidrobot 6y ago
        Lets go back to the original core assertion for the thread - > > Every developer needs access to some servers for example to check the application logs. > I fundamentally disagree with this. So, Developers shouldn't be reaching for SSH access to check logs. If you're encountering problems that you can't diagnose through the existing logs, then you should probably be involving at least one other person - someone who has that production experience, who might have some additional knowledge about the problem. If, and only if you've exhausted other avenues - then reach out for SSH access. But it should be a last resort, not the first resort. Plus, anyone SSHing into production boxes should really be very familiar with how production is configured. You can do more harm than good by poking around on a production box being completely unaware that you're causing alarms and outages elsewhere because you taking a memory dump of nginx caused in-flight requests to get timeouts and so-forth. The people with that experience are generally the DevOps/Infrastructrue folks since they're the ones who deal with production all day, and are going to get the pages if something goes wrong with that.
        shawnz 6y ago
        Some of your developers might have that experience even if they were not hired as devops engineers, or they might be able to consult with their colleagues who are developers who have that experience but aren't devops engineers. I think it is usually better to let people work in the way that is most efficient for them. Also, this doesn't necessarily have to apply to production systems.
        paranoidrobot 6y ago
        > Some of your developers might have that experience even if they were not hired as devops engineers, or they might be able to consult with their colleagues who are developers who have that experience but aren't devops engineers. I think it is usually better to let people work in the way that is most efficient for them. Yeah, perhaps. It'll depend on the circumstances, right. I've got a reasonable amount of GSuite and Exchange experience, and same for Active Directory. I'm reasonably confident that I can work my way around those and do most of what I need to do without breaking it. I needed some GSuite groups set up, some folks added to them, and a GSuite OAuth application set up and some values passed back and forth to do some integration. The only way to do all of that is with full GSuite Administrator rights. Now, I could ask why they don't just give all Devops folks GSuite admin rights, it'd be much easier (for me) and I could do my job more efficiently. The response is going to be something along the lines of: > You don't need that access most of the time. > The times you do need that access it's often for a limited time or scope, and to resolve a specific problem. > For now, It's better that you work with someone who is responsible for that stuff on a day to day basis to do those things. This is, in my opinion, pretty reasonable. Sure, it meant more delay until someone was available to do the GSuite configuration, and we needed to jump on a call to pass IDs back and forth and test it out. But it got done, and it wasn't overly burdonsome. They didn't hire me as a GSuite, Exchange or AD Admin - they already have folks to handle that. That I have that knowledge and experience is still useful for the company - I know exactly what to request is done, and we can talk on the same level about it. Heck, if it turns out that I need this every day and I'm constantly going back and forth with them on setting things up - then I might get that access, but it'll probably come with an explicit requirement that I use it in specific ways, that I follow their processes/procedures, and keep them informed on when I'm using it and why
    - TuringNYC 6y ago
      I think developers can be devops also - but they are different skills you need to learn and keep up. Someone good at, say, nodejs or python data science may not be the best at CUDA build compilation on CentOS. And being good at both makes you less good at each unless you're working 18hrs a day to keep up with everything. There is also the case of ratios. An organization probably needs more developers in specific areas than DevOps, so with dedicated DevOps you could concentrate similar work from across several teams to a dedicated DevOps team that knows that work very well.
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  It would seem to me that this is the perfect time to pull in someone with more production experience. Perhaps they can use the existing tools to pull logs, or analyse it in some way. Maybe they've seen it before and already know the fix. Giving everyone production SSH experience is, in my experience, a way to run into all sorts of weirdness, not to mention endless frustration. In a modern automated infrastructure, that box is likely a container running on a virtual machine that's ephemeral and can (and probably will) go away at any moment based on any number reasons - maybe CD kicked off a new deployment, or maybe the load changed and the instance was selected for scale-down, or maybe our spot bid for that AZ isn't sufficient for keeping the instance around, maybe you being SSHed in and poking around impacted the health-check, and so it's being killed for not performing right. Theres many other problems, too - lots of applications are built in some way that there's simply no other way than secrets (passwords, api tokens, keys) to reach other systems, particularly third party systems. So production boxes have production secrets, which you probably don't want to share with everyone. Giving everyone SSH access so they can, in theory, take nginx/kernel dumps as needed tends to imply giving superuser rights, which means they can do whatever they like. So, yes, pull in someone else - find some way to try and reproduce the problem NOT on production, if that fails, perhaps there's a way to grab enough detail or pull additional logs or network captures to identify the issue. If that fails, well okay, lets SSH in - but we need to coordinate that to ensure that instance does't go away, and doesn't impact production while you do it.

And it is deeply frustrating when you run up against one of these exceptions and need to wade through some bureaucracy before you can investigate further.

gabereiser 6y ago
the point people are trying to make is that if you are at the scale where a kernel bug or an nginx bug is borking your app, it's not the developers job to go poking around the system for a fix. It's the devops/infra people's job. In my world, if you want to investigate an nginx bug... "docker run -it nginx:latest /bin/bash" and go for it... find the issue, reproduce it, then fix it in the pipeline and deploy again. You didn't touch production at all. If your debugging relies on being ON PRODUCTION, you don't suffer from the scale you need to be on there in the first place.
- jclulow 6y ago
  Not all bugs are sufficiently cheaply reproducible outside the environment in which they are observed. It seems silly to tie your hands behind your back when you could just inspect what the computer is doing and then fix it.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Why can't your developers be "devops people"?
  - paranoidrobot 6y ago
    I've already written a response to this elsewhere in the thread, but developers are not all equal. You can't hire twenty developers that all have the same skill/inclinations, the same interests, the same experience. That's not to say that a DevOps Engineer is some super 10x rockstar developer - no, they're going to have the same variations on skill, interests, experience, etc. It depends on your environment, but there's so much different tech once you count the entire stack, that I don't think it's reasonable to expect any one person to be an expert on all of it, or even a lot of it.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      Sure, but "not all developers can be devops engineers" doesn't necessarily imply "none of your developers should have server access".
      - paranoidrobot 6y ago
        Lets go back to the original core assertion for the thread - > > Every developer needs access to some servers for example to check the application logs. > I fundamentally disagree with this. So, Developers shouldn't be reaching for SSH access to check logs. If you're encountering problems that you can't diagnose through the existing logs, then you should probably be involving at least one other person - someone who has that production experience, who might have some additional knowledge about the problem. If, and only if you've exhausted other avenues - then reach out for SSH access. But it should be a last resort, not the first resort. Plus, anyone SSHing into production boxes should really be very familiar with how production is configured. You can do more harm than good by poking around on a production box being completely unaware that you're causing alarms and outages elsewhere because you taking a memory dump of nginx caused in-flight requests to get timeouts and so-forth. The people with that experience are generally the DevOps/Infrastructrue folks since they're the ones who deal with production all day, and are going to get the pages if something goes wrong with that.
        shawnz 6y ago
        Some of your developers might have that experience even if they were not hired as devops engineers, or they might be able to consult with their colleagues who are developers who have that experience but aren't devops engineers. I think it is usually better to let people work in the way that is most efficient for them. Also, this doesn't necessarily have to apply to production systems.
        paranoidrobot 6y ago
        > Some of your developers might have that experience even if they were not hired as devops engineers, or they might be able to consult with their colleagues who are developers who have that experience but aren't devops engineers. I think it is usually better to let people work in the way that is most efficient for them. Yeah, perhaps. It'll depend on the circumstances, right. I've got a reasonable amount of GSuite and Exchange experience, and same for Active Directory. I'm reasonably confident that I can work my way around those and do most of what I need to do without breaking it. I needed some GSuite groups set up, some folks added to them, and a GSuite OAuth application set up and some values passed back and forth to do some integration. The only way to do all of that is with full GSuite Administrator rights. Now, I could ask why they don't just give all Devops folks GSuite admin rights, it'd be much easier (for me) and I could do my job more efficiently. The response is going to be something along the lines of: > You don't need that access most of the time. > The times you do need that access it's often for a limited time or scope, and to resolve a specific problem. > For now, It's better that you work with someone who is responsible for that stuff on a day to day basis to do those things. This is, in my opinion, pretty reasonable. Sure, it meant more delay until someone was available to do the GSuite configuration, and we needed to jump on a call to pass IDs back and forth and test it out. But it got done, and it wasn't overly burdonsome. They didn't hire me as a GSuite, Exchange or AD Admin - they already have folks to handle that. That I have that knowledge and experience is still useful for the company - I know exactly what to request is done, and we can talk on the same level about it. Heck, if it turns out that I need this every day and I'm constantly going back and forth with them on setting things up - then I might get that access, but it'll probably come with an explicit requirement that I use it in specific ways, that I follow their processes/procedures, and keep them informed on when I'm using it and why
  - TuringNYC 6y ago
    I think developers can be devops also - but they are different skills you need to learn and keep up. Someone good at, say, nodejs or python data science may not be the best at CUDA build compilation on CentOS. And being good at both makes you less good at each unless you're working 18hrs a day to keep up with everything. There is also the case of ratios. An organization probably needs more developers in specific areas than DevOps, so with dedicated DevOps you could concentrate similar work from across several teams to a dedicated DevOps team that knows that work very well.
paranoidrobot 6y ago
It would seem to me that this is the perfect time to pull in someone with more production experience. Perhaps they can use the existing tools to pull logs, or analyse it in some way. Maybe they've seen it before and already know the fix. Giving everyone production SSH experience is, in my experience, a way to run into all sorts of weirdness, not to mention endless frustration. In a modern automated infrastructure, that box is likely a container running on a virtual machine that's ephemeral and can (and probably will) go away at any moment based on any number reasons - maybe CD kicked off a new deployment, or maybe the load changed and the instance was selected for scale-down, or maybe our spot bid for that AZ isn't sufficient for keeping the instance around, maybe you being SSHed in and poking around impacted the health-check, and so it's being killed for not performing right. Theres many other problems, too - lots of applications are built in some way that there's simply no other way than secrets (passwords, api tokens, keys) to reach other systems, particularly third party systems. So production boxes have production secrets, which you probably don't want to share with everyone. Giving everyone SSH access so they can, in theory, take nginx/kernel dumps as needed tends to imply giving superuser rights, which means they can do whatever they like. So, yes, pull in someone else - find some way to try and reproduce the problem NOT on production, if that fails, perhaps there's a way to grab enough detail or pull additional logs or network captures to identify the issue. If that fails, well okay, lets SSH in - but we need to coordinate that to ensure that instance does't go away, and doesn't impact production while you do it.