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A bit over a year ago I researched what "Devops" means, and the answer seemed to be Developers being able to push code to production without having to involve O
by bbrazil 11y ago
A bit over a year ago I researched what "Devops" means, and the answer seemed to be Developers being able to push code to production without having to involve Operations. This sounds like a good goal to have (presuming you've got good unittests etc.) as it removes an unnecessary friction for developers.
What it doesn't include is all the higher-value work the people on the Operational side tend to provide, like thinking about rollbacks, machine failure, network failure, provisioning, capacity planning, change/configuration management, security, monitoring etc - which is not to say that all developers don't think about these things, their focus tends to be on developing product rather than these non-functional requirements.
I'm presently in a world of Ubuntu LTS+a few manual backports for similar reasons as the authors. My home systems are ansible managed, giving me things like wireshark installed everywhere if I need it and new machines automatically hooked into Prometheus monitoring (which is much easier with my debs). I've seen what happens if you try to manually manage machines, and know that a small bit of upfront work will bring dividends later.
Writing the core code is just one critical step in running software long term, let's not forget the rest of the critical steps to keep it running in a sane way in the future.
- chei0aiV 11y agohttps://packages.debian.org/prometheus https://packages.debian.org/prometheus
- bbrazil 11y agohttp://deb.robustperception.io/ http://deb.robustperception.io/ is my nightly build. It's one of the few things I want to run on the very bleeding edge of.
- stephenr 11y agoMany people have different interpretations of the term 'DevOps', but what you're describing in that first paragraph is Continuous Deployment. Yes, it's related to (in that it's often a beneficial result of) but it's not explicitly the same as DevOps, by any definition I've seen, good or bad.
- bbrazil 11y agoAmong all the definitions I found, that was the only common theme. I've been discussing this with others in the "DevOps" space and in recruiting terms a "DevOps engineer" seems to mostly mean an "Ops engineer". True Devops (in the sense of developers who also care about and perform all of their own operations) is a culture, not a job role and one that seems quite rare in the wild.
- devonkim 11y agoDefinitions of the term are almost as diluted as "cloud" is. It is easier to define it as what it's not. Look up Jez Humble for a bit more idea into the origins of the term. The term is a primarily a buzzword among larger companies and almost always followed up by some engineering cultural change objective rather than about how code is deployed or even developed and run. You know that it's another management-focused trend when there's entire conferences where people say devops constantly without mentioning anything about code and half the folks in attendance or speaking are consultants in suits that consider Excel formulas the extent of their coding skills. So the common theme I see is "any way besides what we used to do operations traditionally." It's mostly used for "operations with some idea of what is being deployed on the stack above them." Most start-ups don't have this problem at all with modern infrastructure (no more rack and stack at your 5-man start-up probably) though by definition because rigidly defined roles are a Big Company Problem.
- stephenr 11y agoThe problem modern startups have is that a developer sees he can make calls to AWS or Azure APIs and assumes that makes him qualified to define system architecture, security policies, deployment processes, etc. "Modern" infrastructure (by which I assume you mean provisioned, destroyable VPS instances + associated services such as AWS, Azure, etc) is effectively just a new "how" - you call an API instead of deploying a config file or similar. You still need to know the "what" and the "why" to be effective.
- devonkim 11y ago