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So much to unpack here. Let's start with: > devops was able to convince the industry that "software engineers own their own infra" is a viable thing to do so t

So much to unpack here. Let's start with: > devops was able to convince the industry that "software engineers own their own infra" is a viable thing to do so they could do engineering work, expect, they're out of their element. Devops wasn't about getting ops people to start doing development. It was about getting developers to be start doing ops because infrastructure definition became a tye of coding. What's incredible about your inversion of understanding is it's exactly the point of OP's posted article - that people misunderstand devops in exactly the way you just did. > That's not their job. devops should be pulling in open-source technology that's developed by real engineers and write tiny packets of glue code to make it work to add value. "Real engineers"? This is a Googleism and their caste system of "real engineers" and "software reliability engineers". The rest of the industry doesn't coddle their precious "real engineers". Designing a resilient, scalable, frugal, operateable architecture of load balancers, servers, caches, queues, dead letter queues, and all their associated metrics and alarms is absolutely "real engineering" and worth the time and attention of the same engineers that are building the core business value of their company. > k8s is a terrible experience and a terrible abstraction. Completely agreed. But note that that K8S came from Google and their 2-tier system of engineering. But the quote in OP's article is from Werner Vogels - AWS's CTO, and Amazon is legendary (nay infamous) for asking their engineers to work on ops. So, I agree with the last half of your post - K8s IS a scam, and should not be operated by an ops-focused team (probably not operated by anyone at all) But if you had follow the intention of the DevOps movement, not the perverted definition of DevOps, then the k8s scam was obvious from day one.

ayberk 5y ago
> "Real engineers"? This is a Googleism and their caste system of "real engineers" and "software reliability engineers". The rest of the industry doesn't coddle their precious "real engineers". There's no such caste system at Google. SREs have the same bar as the SWEs, and plenty of people switch roles from one to other. SREs are also well-respected and I don't think anyone would consider them as _not_ real engineers. > Designing a resilient, scalable, frugal, operateable architecture of load balancers, servers, caches, queues, dead letter queues, and all their associated metrics and alarms is absolutely "real engineering" and worth the time and attention of the same engineers that are building the core business value of their company. You are absolutely right and that's why having people focusing on that is _really_ important. Having worked at AWS previously, I can tell you that when you force your software engineers to do everything and promote them based on _what_ they deliver without caring about the operational load, you end up with crazy oncalls and poorly-designed software. There's a reason why AWS oncalls are infamous whereas Google's are not.
- stepbeek 5y ago
  > There's a reason why AWS oncalls are infamous whereas Google's are not. Could market share be a significant factor here?
  - ayberk 5y ago
    It really isn't. It's just the cultural difference between the two companies. I have been told that GCP oncalls are a lot busier than rest of the Google, but it's still nowhere close to the suffering I had at AWS. It's an organizational pain and comes from the mindset AWS has towards software development and their engineers.
    - amzn-throw 5y ago
      AWS's mindset is software is useless without customers. Google doesn't seem to have the same care - it's a charity for academic software engineers to spend AdSense revenue on abstract high level computer science problems not caring about practical applications. It's why most Google X ideas flame out. It's why there's a new chat app every year. But - it's a net positive for humanity. Google publishes a lot of papers, and I think genuinely has moved humanity forward in the last few decades. I don't have a PhD and I don't do L33tcode, so I don't think I'm smart enough to be at Google, but honestly I don't know if I would want to be. I prefer shipping.
      - ayberk 5y ago
        I'm sure you're more than enough smart to be at Google :) It's just practice and luck. I completely agree that people who prefer to ship fast would be happier at AWS. I've heard all the horror stories about how slow Google is, but I think GCP has a great balance between speed and quality. I'm definitely happier here, but I understand why some people would be happier at AWS.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  I can't find the post, but I base this on rachelbythebay's writing - who got hired as an SRE, and then tried to become an SWE and was told she couldn't just convert. But fair enough, I don't work at Google, so I'll withdraw the point. Having said that, knowing that AWS engineers do oncall, and GCP don't (letting the SREs do it) makes me still think there is some sort of two-tier system.
wruza 5y ago
Devops wasn't about getting ops people to start doing development. It was about getting developers to be start doing ops because infrastructure definition became a tye of coding. Reminds me of an idea that any user may expand a system by making plugins/changes, if you provide them a sufficiently humane programming language. Then they still can’t, and a completely new developers category is born. Seems like another one here, cause it always turns backwards like that.

ayberk 5y ago

> "Real engineers"? This is a Googleism and their caste system of "real engineers" and "software reliability engineers". The rest of the industry doesn't coddle their precious "real engineers". There's no such caste system at Google. SREs have the same bar as the SWEs, and plenty of people switch roles from one to other. SREs are also well-respected and I don't think anyone would consider them as _not_ real engineers. > Designing a resilient, scalable, frugal, operateable architecture of load balancers, servers, caches, queues, dead letter queues, and all their associated metrics and alarms is absolutely "real engineering" and worth the time and attention of the same engineers that are building the core business value of their company. You are absolutely right and that's why having people focusing on that is _really_ important. Having worked at AWS previously, I can tell you that when you force your software engineers to do everything and promote them based on _what_ they deliver without caring about the operational load, you end up with crazy oncalls and poorly-designed software. There's a reason why AWS oncalls are infamous whereas Google's are not.

stepbeek 5y ago
> There's a reason why AWS oncalls are infamous whereas Google's are not. Could market share be a significant factor here?
- ayberk 5y ago
  It really isn't. It's just the cultural difference between the two companies. I have been told that GCP oncalls are a lot busier than rest of the Google, but it's still nowhere close to the suffering I had at AWS. It's an organizational pain and comes from the mindset AWS has towards software development and their engineers.
  - amzn-throw 5y ago
    AWS's mindset is software is useless without customers. Google doesn't seem to have the same care - it's a charity for academic software engineers to spend AdSense revenue on abstract high level computer science problems not caring about practical applications. It's why most Google X ideas flame out. It's why there's a new chat app every year. But - it's a net positive for humanity. Google publishes a lot of papers, and I think genuinely has moved humanity forward in the last few decades. I don't have a PhD and I don't do L33tcode, so I don't think I'm smart enough to be at Google, but honestly I don't know if I would want to be. I prefer shipping.
    - ayberk 5y ago
      I'm sure you're more than enough smart to be at Google :) It's just practice and luck. I completely agree that people who prefer to ship fast would be happier at AWS. I've heard all the horror stories about how slow Google is, but I think GCP has a great balance between speed and quality. I'm definitely happier here, but I understand why some people would be happier at AWS.
deanCommie 5y ago
I can't find the post, but I base this on rachelbythebay's writing - who got hired as an SRE, and then tried to become an SWE and was told she couldn't just convert. But fair enough, I don't work at Google, so I'll withdraw the point. Having said that, knowing that AWS engineers do oncall, and GCP don't (letting the SREs do it) makes me still think there is some sort of two-tier system.

wruza 5y ago

Devops wasn't about getting ops people to start doing development. It was about getting developers to be start doing ops because infrastructure definition became a tye of coding. Reminds me of an idea that any user may expand a system by making plugins/changes, if you provide them a sufficiently humane programming language. Then they still can’t, and a completely new developers category is born. Seems like another one here, cause it always turns backwards like that.