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> The way I see it, the fallout from the removal (if there is to be any) was sealed at the moment it wasn't documented. But the person who removes it have to d

> The way I see it, the fallout from the removal (if there is to be any) was sealed at the moment it wasn't documented. But the person who removes it have to deal with the aftermath. Midnight callout, fixing corrupted data, etc.

deathanatos 4y ago
Sure. You don't blindly remove stuff, you do investigate and try to rule out as many possibilities as possible before clicking the "nuke" button. I.e., you manage the risk. The alternative — following Chesterton's parable absolutely — means you'll be dragging along, and critically, paying for — both in cash and in complexity of understanding —, an ever-accumulating Katamari of junk that, in all probability, serves no purpose whatsoever. Trying to justify "we want to continue to paying indefinitely for this thing that we don't thing does anything important, but we're not at all sure" — well, at the very least, you're going to look like a clown if you try to pass that by any sort of management that's not asleep at the wheel. I've removed an awful lot of this stuff in my career. I've gotten remarkably good at deleting a lot of infra with minimal to no impact. Mostly, that comes from first knowing how the actually important infra works, which helps rule out that the odd end over here is going to have any impact at all. Occam's razor helps greatly: asking, "if it did have an impact, how?". Graceful decoms, such as imaging a VM, or just stopping it for a month prior to out-right deletion, again help build confidence in the non-impact, and reduce the risk if you're wrong: you just turn that VM back on. I.e., having a rollback plan such that if there is some unforeseen contingency, that you can get back to the original state. (Though every now and then, there is an odd service for which you can't do this. Those are annoying.) But even a rollback is good: it provides a valuable clue as to what the unknown thing does, and now you know where to start digging. It's one of those things where the pragmatic view is the middle ground: wildly deleting things is a poor choice, but so too is blindly keeping things. Particularly when corps these days want to retain nobody past ~2 years, you end up with a lot of knowledge getting bus factored. If you don't want to get stuck in that quagmire, you've got to be able to clean house.

deathanatos 4y ago

Sure. You don't blindly remove stuff, you do investigate and try to rule out as many possibilities as possible before clicking the "nuke" button. I.e., you manage the risk. The alternative — following Chesterton's parable absolutely — means you'll be dragging along, and critically, paying for — both in cash and in complexity of understanding —, an ever-accumulating Katamari of junk that, in all probability, serves no purpose whatsoever. Trying to justify "we want to continue to paying indefinitely for this thing that we don't thing does anything important, but we're not at all sure" — well, at the very least, you're going to look like a clown if you try to pass that by any sort of management that's not asleep at the wheel. I've removed an awful lot of this stuff in my career. I've gotten remarkably good at deleting a lot of infra with minimal to no impact. Mostly, that comes from first knowing how the actually important infra works, which helps rule out that the odd end over here is going to have any impact at all. Occam's razor helps greatly: asking, "if it did have an impact, how?". Graceful decoms, such as imaging a VM, or just stopping it for a month prior to out-right deletion, again help build confidence in the non-impact, and reduce the risk if you're wrong: you just turn that VM back on. I.e., having a rollback plan such that if there is some unforeseen contingency, that you can get back to the original state. (Though every now and then, there is an odd service for which you can't do this. Those are annoying.) But even a rollback is good: it provides a valuable clue as to what the unknown thing does, and now you know where to start digging. It's one of those things where the pragmatic view is the middle ground: wildly deleting things is a poor choice, but so too is blindly keeping things. Particularly when corps these days want to retain nobody past ~2 years, you end up with a lot of knowledge getting bus factored. If you don't want to get stuck in that quagmire, you've got to be able to clean house.