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As an old school sysadmin for a long time, the feeling I've always gotten from DevOps is that it is like anything else in the big ball of mud we call "computer

As an old school sysadmin for a long time, the feeling I've always gotten from DevOps is that it is like anything else in the big ball of mud we call "computer science": a new generation re-inventing the wheel. To be sure, the scale is larger than ever before. But history is replete with "IT in the large". Just look at mainframes, quietly ticking away for decades on loads that people are re-discovering how to handle. Partly I blame this on the hubris of the young - "this ain't your granddad's IT." Heck, I recognize it in myself from years ago, when I was all in on Linux, but the BSDs had been around a while. But I do believe there is a wanton lack of communication in the industry and academia. Part of this is on purpose - companies don't like "giving away" their hard won lessons, nor is it (short term) profitable to pay people to write documentation. But there's a bigger culture around "if you don't understand, you're just not smart enough." It's toxic. We could sorely use something like the group in "Anathem" that does nothing but study history and remind others of it. I wish we could learn the lessons of the past without having to repeat them and adding yet another standard to the fourteen already out there.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Yeah, the rule always seems to be "two steps forward, one step back." I'm not convinced it's a hubris thing. Many of these "two steps forward, one step back" advancements happen because a commercial entity has intentionally blocked the tech tree from advancing in a certain direction that would undercut their position. The tree still advances, but it has to grow around the blockade, and that involves a certain amount of seemingly redundant work. It's only redundant in the sense of technological novelty, though. It's not redundant in the social context.
- specialist 6y ago
  The population growth of the industry is much faster than diffusion rate of best practices. People become attached to initial ideas, resist any change, regardless of relative merits. Everett Roger's The Diffusion of Innovation [1962], marketing's seminal textbook, explains all. Everything since is rehash (at best) or worse than wrong. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional knowledge and have simply created a new version of your old workforce in their place. The hubris of course comes in accepting the masquerade that everything was really about innovation in the first place, rather than cost-cutting, and rather than rehiring for the old institutional knowledge, just reinventing all the wheels in the new situation with the hubris that it is vastly different than what came before (even though it isn't) because it is far more innovative (even though that is unlikely, because the businesses are still the same, the red tape the same, the expectations set by people still real familiar with the old predecessors, etc).
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Automating repeatable things to remove the need for some institutional knowledge is a good thing.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Definitely. I'm not claiming at all that it didn't necessarily come from a good place originally or that it hasn't had good ideas, just that the hype cycle around the kernels of good ideas became it's own demon that lost sight of the institutional knowledge forest for some of the most easily automated milling of institutional knowledge trees, and were surprised what happen when the forest was a clear cut field strewn with detritus and they had lost more than they expected in the culling. (I think that metaphor works? It sounds good at least.)
    - npsimons 6y ago
      This I will give to DevOps - it's hyper focus on automation, change management and repeatability are all good things. As someone with a leg in each domain (software developer by day, system administrator by night), I've really felt that both areas could learn a lot from each other. These days with version control being as quick and easy as it is, there's no reason not to use it for everything. Configuration as code is immensely powerful. And repeatability to eliminate "well, it works on my machine" is fucking brilliant. But there still needs to be documentation. The why must always be explained, even with the most readable of code, that can only layout the what and the how.
BobbyJo 6y ago
That's not the way I interpret 're-inventing the wheel.' I don't see it as the next gen thinking they are smarter, but rather questioning the assumptions built into the last gen. Mainframes vs Distributed (cloud, kubernetes, etc) systems have different behaviors at different scales and are useful for different kinds of applications and business sizes. A perfect example is the startup economy. I can spool up a service for a few hundred people essentially for free, but still have the ability to scale if things catch on and I need to serve hundreds of thousands. That same scaling using old technologies would be a lot less smooth. I mean, even if we do assume each new tech fad is mostly driven by hubris, if the results benefit the ecosystem, which cloud undoubtedly has through democratizing scalability, so what? As far as the secret keeping of industry, I don't by that at all. I've worked for a diverse set of organizations, and every single one of them wanted to either trumpet their own practices to build clout with developers, or utilize knowledge in the public domain so that talent was easier to find. If anything companies avoid having secret sauce in their infra at all costs.
- npsimons 6y ago
  So yes, the spread of powerful computing certainly is to be lauded. I'm not denying that, but I feel it's more to do with a driving down of costs than anything. If (and I admit that's a big if) big iron vendors had paid attention and not rested on their laurels, I truly believe they could have easily morphed into "cloud" providers, and possibly even brought it on sooner, like a decade earlier. But the activity of keeping secrets is still with us, even in this age of widespread FLOSS. Just look up how many software patents are still held. It's no good trumpeting your organization's advantages if everyone has the same advantages.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Yeah, the rule always seems to be "two steps forward, one step back." I'm not convinced it's a hubris thing. Many of these "two steps forward, one step back" advancements happen because a commercial entity has intentionally blocked the tech tree from advancing in a certain direction that would undercut their position. The tree still advances, but it has to grow around the blockade, and that involves a certain amount of seemingly redundant work. It's only redundant in the sense of technological novelty, though. It's not redundant in the social context.

specialist 6y ago
The population growth of the industry is much faster than diffusion rate of best practices. People become attached to initial ideas, resist any change, regardless of relative merits. Everett Roger's The Diffusion of Innovation [1962], marketing's seminal textbook, explains all. Everything since is rehash (at best) or worse than wrong. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
WorldMaker 6y ago
I think it's a hubris thing now, but it was clear that the "DevOps" movement/hype started as a cost-cutting measure masquerading as innovation. Who needs classic Ops/IT/sysadmins when developers can just automate all that in their spare time between working on other systems? It shouldn't be a surprise that once the cost-cutting is done you realize too late after the fact that you lost a whole bunch of institutional knowledge and have simply created a new version of your old workforce in their place. The hubris of course comes in accepting the masquerade that everything was really about innovation in the first place, rather than cost-cutting, and rather than rehiring for the old institutional knowledge, just reinventing all the wheels in the new situation with the hubris that it is vastly different than what came before (even though it isn't) because it is far more innovative (even though that is unlikely, because the businesses are still the same, the red tape the same, the expectations set by people still real familiar with the old predecessors, etc).
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Automating repeatable things to remove the need for some institutional knowledge is a good thing.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Definitely. I'm not claiming at all that it didn't necessarily come from a good place originally or that it hasn't had good ideas, just that the hype cycle around the kernels of good ideas became it's own demon that lost sight of the institutional knowledge forest for some of the most easily automated milling of institutional knowledge trees, and were surprised what happen when the forest was a clear cut field strewn with detritus and they had lost more than they expected in the culling. (I think that metaphor works? It sounds good at least.)
  - npsimons 6y ago
    This I will give to DevOps - it's hyper focus on automation, change management and repeatability are all good things. As someone with a leg in each domain (software developer by day, system administrator by night), I've really felt that both areas could learn a lot from each other. These days with version control being as quick and easy as it is, there's no reason not to use it for everything. Configuration as code is immensely powerful. And repeatability to eliminate "well, it works on my machine" is fucking brilliant. But there still needs to be documentation. The why must always be explained, even with the most readable of code, that can only layout the what and the how.

BobbyJo 6y ago

That's not the way I interpret 're-inventing the wheel.' I don't see it as the next gen thinking they are smarter, but rather questioning the assumptions built into the last gen. Mainframes vs Distributed (cloud, kubernetes, etc) systems have different behaviors at different scales and are useful for different kinds of applications and business sizes. A perfect example is the startup economy. I can spool up a service for a few hundred people essentially for free, but still have the ability to scale if things catch on and I need to serve hundreds of thousands. That same scaling using old technologies would be a lot less smooth. I mean, even if we do assume each new tech fad is mostly driven by hubris, if the results benefit the ecosystem, which cloud undoubtedly has through democratizing scalability, so what? As far as the secret keeping of industry, I don't by that at all. I've worked for a diverse set of organizations, and every single one of them wanted to either trumpet their own practices to build clout with developers, or utilize knowledge in the public domain so that talent was easier to find. If anything companies avoid having secret sauce in their infra at all costs.

npsimons 6y ago
So yes, the spread of powerful computing certainly is to be lauded. I'm not denying that, but I feel it's more to do with a driving down of costs than anything. If (and I admit that's a big if) big iron vendors had paid attention and not rested on their laurels, I truly believe they could have easily morphed into "cloud" providers, and possibly even brought it on sooner, like a decade earlier. But the activity of keeping secrets is still with us, even in this age of widespread FLOSS. Just look up how many software patents are still held. It's no good trumpeting your organization's advantages if everyone has the same advantages.