[HN Gopher] DevOps: An idea so good, no one admits they don't do it ___________________________________________________________________ DevOps: An idea so good, no one admits they don't do it Author : wagslane Score : 167 points Date : 2022-08-29 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (wagslane.dev) (TXT) w3m dump (wagslane.dev) | oxfordmale wrote: | Agile is a philosophy, it is not sprints, story points or | whatever crazy methodology an expensive Agile Coaching company | has come up with. The same applies to DevOps. DevOps could just | be a bash script, written by the developer, to feit their | codebase. It doesn't have to be fancy or require an extensive | amount of investment. | mxuribe wrote: | You sound like Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies (which is | a good thing!)...specifically it remains me of that scene when | Daniel-San asks him what "belt" he is...and Mr. Miyagi responds | "Calvin Klein"! (At some point, Mr. Miyagi explains that his | exppertise of Karate is only for the need to survive | encounters, and not worry about which "belt" he had achieved.) | dec0dedab0de wrote: | I was a network engineer at my previous job, I was fed up with | doing things manually so I learned to code better. Now I'm a full | stack developer writing code for the network team of a different | company. | | One thing that has changed drastically over the last 15 years is | the sharp divide between IT and development. It used to be that | developers were clueless how to deploy their own apps, and IT was | terrified of writing code preferring to do things manually, or | purchase something prepackaged. Now I see developers that | understand firewalls and load balancers, and IT folk that can | script stuff out for themselves. I think we have the push behind | DevOps to thank for that progress, and while there is still a | long ways to go, I think it's a good thing overall. | mxuribe wrote: | > ...writing code for the network team of a different | company... | | Something like is the kind of job that i think i want to do | next. It need not be for a network team...but i'm headed more | for back-end work and these days i rather engage with internal | teams. | | Separately, to your comment on sharp divide...The sharp divide | that i have seen is a lack of cohesion for the following 4 IT | groups: first-level support which gets sent to off-shore; the | folks who (honestly have the most face time with internal | clients who) roam around the office fixing desktops and | building network/wiring, and setting up/fixing A/V equipment in | conference rooms; sys admins; and developers. Furthermore, in | the last 2 companies that i worked for, there has been a push | to "centralize" certain functions like IT and HR to "shared | services"...but at the end, none of these groups seem | centralized! They all now work more separated than ever | before...and most of the interaction between each of these | groups - and even between the 4 subgroups i noted above in IT | alone - mostly communicate via tickets, or some other thick- | layered mechanism. Sure, they've been centralized in that these | people were pulled from some respective business unit, and | brought under a more single umbrella...but in the end, these | workers hate it, the effecicny drops, more bureacracy is | created (which creates no value)...and some executive gets to | lead the shared services...and of course some management | consultant company gets their payday. Oh, and yeah, IT at these | orgs definitely does not use any of the good parts of devops, | agilescrum whatever. Some orgs try and adopt some cookiecutter | approach only to have it create yet more bureacracy...but "hey, | we're agile!" /sigh | notabee wrote: | Corporate kayfabe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe | manuelabeledo wrote: | It kind of feels like devs have been duped for the past twenty or | so years. | | Want to save in project management? Just make devs responsible | for planning and estimating, and call it "agile". | | Want to remove sysadmins and ops? Make devs write their own | configuration for the infrastructure, and say you do "devops". | | Want to eliminate QA? Say that you do TDD. | 0x457 wrote: | > Want to eliminate QA? Say that you do TDD. | | I don't think anyone ever thought of it like this. Well, some | dumb managers probably did. If you want to eliminate QA people, | then you need an enormous automated E2E test suite. To have | that, you need dedicated people who think of and write those | test...one would call it a QA team. | jbverschoor wrote: | Devops means let a non-admin developer have access to aws and | just buy everything he can find in order to try and fix his | shortcomings. | | It'd be better and cheaper to follow a sysop course | vinaypai wrote: | Not directly related to the question, but I personally hate the | term "Sprint". Physiologically, a sprint involve by definition is | a short-term high effort activity that can't be sustained without | a break. | | Does anyone use a different term that doesn't imply working | oneself to death? | duped wrote: | Cycle | 0x457 wrote: | Cycle or stint. I like "stint" more. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | Just changing the word isn't going to change the practice. | You're supposed to take breaks between sprints. There needs to | be planning and alignment to an easily-obtained goal, which | requires time. But most people don't know how to do Scrum and | hand-waive the goal, the planning, the retro. The end result is | unsustainable work with no specific goal in mind that exceeds | the sprint cycle. Or 20 epics all in progress at once. Or | business goals that shift and put unobtainable expectations on | teams. | bot41 wrote: | What's a break period? Where is that described? | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | It's not explicitly described. "The break" (imo) is giving | enough time to planning at the beginning, and actually | dealing with the review & retro items. The length of the | sprint can be shortened so that there is more learning and | planning. Sprints are cancelled if the goal becomes | obsolete. | louwrentius wrote: | This is a content-free extremely meager blog post that doesn't | really belong on the front page of HN but the discussion in the | comments is quite illuminating. | | The discussion shows how a lot of people have wildly different | ideas about what devops is and that in and of itself is | interesting. | wiremine wrote: | Recently I've been reading "When Agile Gets Physical" [1] and | "Extreme Programming Explained": | | 1. "Extreme Programming Explained" explains the importance of | separating values from principles and practices. | | 2. "When Agile Gets Physical" unpacks why using agile software | best practices are horrible for hardware. This is "duh" if you're | a hardware person, but the book goes back to agile/lean first | principles, and then builds up an approach for agile hardware. | | It got me thinking that we often conflate values and practices. | Blinding adopting Scrum or DevOps without understanding some of | the underlying value and principles leads to problems. If you | understand the foundational principles, you're in a much better | position to adopt/reject certain practices for your given | situation. | | In reality, most organizations just adopt a few agile practices, | while rejecting the basic values. | | [1] https://rapidlearningcycles.com/when-agile-gets-physical/ | | [2] https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained- | Embrace... | irrational wrote: | I hate devops. Mainly because I don't want to do it. I liked it | better when there was a dedicated infrastructure team instead of | pushing it down to developers and giving it a new name. | hedora wrote: | Yeah. As a developer, I need a competent QA and operations team | to support me. I'm not competent at those things, but 90% of | developers I've worked with are somehow worse at them. | | I also need 1-2 months between major context switches, and the | ability to declare a subcomponent "ready for release". | | Moving forward, I will actively avoid companies that claim to | use agile, scrum or devops. | | Edit: Also, I want to work on a team that has a good release | manager. | GuB-42 wrote: | The problem with these fad methodologies is that it either works, | or you are not doing it properly. The methodology can't be wrong. | | It is like saying that C programs never crash, because if they | crash, it means you are not using C properly. It is true, but no | one will pretend that, everyone knows that under real life | circumstances, C programs can crash, and there are plenty of | other programming languages that address this issue, at the | expense of other things, like performance or simplicity. | | But for some reason those who push methodologies don't seem to | consider that if that methodology is difficult to implement, or | if it is not robust against things like conflicts of interest and | office politics, or whatever, then maybe it is a problem in their | methodology. It doesn't mean the methodology is bad, just that it | doesn't work in every case, and that some tweaking may be | necessary. | mekoka wrote: | _> We need better definitions for these terms _ | | When I point to the moon with my finger and say "moon", the fool | looks at my finger and calls it the moon. | | Is it more important to mindlessly tag yourself "Agile", with all | the bells and whistles adorning the capital A, or would you | rather just _be_ agile according to the sought out goals and | philosophy, and adapted to your specific situation? | | Is it more important to have a clearer definition of "DevOps", so | that you can more accurately implement all the prescribed | workflows, or would you rather understand the pursued ideals, so | that you can pick and choose what you need, according to _your | specific context_ , unencumbered by a slew of best, but | ultimately useless, practices? | vesinisa wrote: | The author is right that DevOps seems to often mean different | things to different people. I would have loved it if they had | taken more of an attempt at one definition than just that it's | when developers have an understanding of how and where their code | is deployed. That does sound sensible, but what other best | practices does DevOps usually entail? | giantg2 wrote: | I feel like DevOps is a trap. | | Most companies that have sufficient talent and | organization/operational setup don't see a need for DevOps. | | There seem to be a lot of other companies that are sucked in by | its promises and think that it will solve their issues. | Surprise... this didn't fix your shitty policies, | disorganized/unempowered org structure, or cheap talent (cause | you're unwilling to pay or train). | | I assume there are a few places that can benefit from this. Maybe | some medium to large tech companies with great procedures, | documentation, and an empowered org structure. Especially if | they're paying enough for people who can manage it. The other is | probably for very small places wirh fairly simple tech where you | can't afford entire teams of people so you empower someone to | really own the system top to bottom (without ever calling it | DevOps). | turtlebits wrote: | IME, letting developers have free reign over service | architecture/deployment/CI/observability is a bad idea. | Especially when every team comes up with their own option. | | You need some sort of Devops (best practices if not a team) to | provide guidance and help implement standards for these. | giantg2 wrote: | I agree, if we're talking about places big enough to have | multiple teams. The thing I was pointing out is that most | places that have multiple teams are terrible at setting up | best practices. They'd be better off with a centralized | "environments" team provisioning the server, network, etc so | the dev teams can work on the actually implementation. At | least it's easier to maintain standards, or at least | consistency, across apps if the low/mid level config is | handled by one team. | | When I was talking about small places, I mean like tiny mom | and pop non-tech companies with an IT department of 1-5 | people. | ryukoposting wrote: | Every company that has a software product also has DevOps, | whether or not they call it that. If someone manages your cloud | infrastructure, they're doing devops. If someone is coming up | with CI/CD setups, they're doing devops. If someone came up | with SOP for distributing new releases, they're doing devops. | | Whether or not anyone's title has "DevOps" in it, devops tasks | are still devops tasks. By the same logic, even though I | watered the office plants this morning, I am still a firmware | engineer- not PlantOps. | | The real trap of DevOps is the assumption that it's anything | new or non-essential. DevOps has existed since the notion of | "software as a product" came into existence, we just didn't | have a name for it yet. | | None of this is to say you need a dedicated DevOps person (or | PlantOps, for that matter). DevOps is an integral part of any | software product, even if no specific member of the development | team is dedicated solely to DevOps tasks. | giantg2 wrote: | I don't think those are DevOps by themselves. You have to be | doing the Dev part of the system in addition to the Ops part. | The traditional format is that some team or tram member would | do ops work while others did the dev work. | ebiester wrote: | Or, alternatively, it might not be a great idea in all cases. | | Maybe your development team shouldn't develop terraform the four | times a year they need it. It might even be faster to have two or | three individuals with a singular vision for the system in a | smaller team. (There may not be enough work for some teams to | have someone with specific DevOps skills. However, that ends up | in a partial-shared-service model where team members get called | off for organizational concerns.) | | Maybe you need a subject matter expert that will develop | standards for teams and select a set of tools, setting those up | so that teams can build off those for their needs. (This is why | Ops are often shared services teams.) | | Maybe it's not a great idea if the first team to encounter a | problem picks the tool that works best for them, and the | organization ends up with multiple tools because there was nobody | with both the time and expertise dedicated to the analysis. (This | is why Ops are often shared services teams.) | | We need to break down barriers. We need to adopt valuable | practices. However, the parts of DevOps that don't make it to the | real world may just be because they don't solve the problems of | the organization. | nkotov wrote: | The mistake was turning DevOps into a job position which resulted | in silos being created more when the whole purpose was to | remove/prevent silos and to allow developers to operate at their | own pace. | jammycakes wrote: | In a previous job, I joined a team that was supposed to be | introducing DevOps to the organisation. | | It started out well -- we spent a few months hacking with | Terraform, Docker, Vagrant, Kubernetes, and related technologies | to implement an infrastructure-as-code approach -- automating the | process of provisioning and decommissioning servers, and building | a setup where development teams could deploy updates with a | simple git push. | | Unfortunately it all went downhill fairly rapidly. We ended up | spending the majority of our time manually applying security | patches to a bunch of snowflake servers that we'd lifted-and- | shifted from another hosting provider to AWS, and fielding | support requests from the development teams. Within a year, we | were being told in no uncertain terms by our project manager that | we were an operations team, not a development team. | | It felt like a complete bait-and-switch. Within two years, I had | left the organisation in question and moved on to a new job | elsewhere doing actual development again. Last I heard, the | entire team had been disbanded. | | It sounds like the author of this article must have had a very | similar experience. I wonder just how common it is. It seems that | in many places, "DevOps" is all Ops and no Dev. | mr_tristan wrote: | > It seems that in many places, "DevOps" is all Ops and no Dev. | | This was definitely my experience at my last couple of jobs. At | my last one they "scaled out their DevOps team" by hiring tons | of juniors with next to no software development background. And | then they "empowered" teams by assigning the juniors to each | dev group. As a result, we ended up having to train them how to | do their core jobs, which... went about as well as you'd think. | | Eventually, there was an attempt to shift everyone to | kubernetes. They had a special "DevOps" team build a layer on | top of it to handle the non-kubernetes aspects of deployment as | well, and somehow manage them together using Helm. If you're | wondering "what the hell does that mean", well, it turned out | nobody really knew. These "DevOps" engineers didn't really seem | to understand kubernetes core concepts, and just ended up | hacking away with some scripts on top of terraform delivered | via Helm until something got configured. It was incredibly slow | to deliver, hard to use, and I just stayed away from it until | some exec threw down the mandates. (And then everyone started | quitting because it was an absolute disaster.) | | Ultimately, these are really stories about bad management, not | really anything to do with DevOps. But that's how these things | roll - some new hot concept comes to town, and bad managers try | to adopt the term, without really understanding it. | zo1 wrote: | It's not always bad managers or management. The fancy new | hotness gets pushed onto them by smooth-talking evangelists. | For every criticism or question they have a snazzy little | quip and retort that makes you look like an idiot for not | knowing "the obviousness" of your errors and how this new | fad/tech/framework/methodology solves it. And if that retort | doesn't work, they just tell you "it's standard in the | industry, dunno what you want me to tell you". | | And from the outside, this all just looks like resume padding | and job-security. Devops is the new priesthood, subscribe or | be reduced to irrelevance by config warriors. | stcredzero wrote: | _The fancy new hotness gets pushed onto them by smooth- | talking evangelists._ | | Gets pushed onto them top-down. This means there is no real | competition, no real empiricism, no real comparative merit | involved in the switch. | | _How_ should never be imposed top-down. It 's only goals | and how success is measured which should be top-down. The | classic example of this was when Jeff Bezos mandated that | all Amazon software systems should be accessible by APIs | over the internal network, or else one would be fired. | | Whenever I've seen _How_ imposed top down, I 've only seen | the lower level managers talk about how they could put off | and passive aggressively stymie the initiative. | hackernewds wrote: | Isn't it apparent in the name? MarketOps, ServerOps, PaymentOps | - all Operations | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | Here is how some companies "do DevOps": 1. An | operations team with a different name. 2. A platform team | with a different name. 3. A development team with a | different name. 4. A "CI/CD team". 5. A role (ex. | "dev who automates ops", "ops who codes", "support specialist | who codes", all three in one). 6. A chart that the | delivery manager maintains. | | Here is what DevOps should actually be: 1. | Delivering rapidly and consistently with extremely high levels | of confidence. 2. The right people address problems | correctly, immediately, the first time, and fix it so it | doesn't happen again. 3. That's it. | spaceywilly wrote: | > We ended up spending the majority of our time ... fielding | support requests from the development teams | | This has been my experience at 3 different small-medium | companies now. A too small DevOps team suddenly is in the | critical path for even the most trivial software task, then | engineering productivity grinds to a halt. I think a much | better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set | up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams | handle their own deployments and infrastructure. Give people | what they need to do it themselves instead of having to open a | support ticket for everything. | jammycakes wrote: | > I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams | to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard | rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and | infrastructure. | | I think that's how DevOps is actually supposed to be done in | the first place. You view Ops -- and the code used to manage | and support it -- as a product, and get a specialised team of | experienced Devs (and architects) to build it. | | Once you've got the basic infrastructure and architecture in | place, you then train up the individual development teams to | customise it, extend it and troubleshoot it as they need to. | In much the same way as they do with any other software | product. | JamesBarney wrote: | My experience is what inevitably happens is the ops team | goes an writes a layer on top of Kubernetes, and now | instead of dealing with Kubernetes you're dealing with a | half baked poorly written abstraction with zero | documentation and no StackOverflow on top Kubernetes. So | you need to become an expert in both. | | Most organizations don't have the resources, mindset, or | skills to support a software library product and should | only do it as a last resort. | lazide wrote: | Most developers won't know how to do it without footgunning | themselves constantly is the problem. | | If the dev ops team is staffed enough to develop integrations | that won't allow that AND won't get in the way, and then | train folks and 'keep the line' enough to stop the scope | creep - they're probably not at a shitty small/medium sized | shop. | louwrentius wrote: | Sounds like the organization went full cargo cult with pets | (lift and shift) instead of a devops-ready environment. | sascha_sl wrote: | I've not seen one place that has escaped this problem though. | | Something is either old and nobody feels like fixing it or | something doesn't fit into the current constraints of the | platform featureset. So they build something on their own, | probably undocumented and without consulting the supposed | DevOps team, but still using parts of the platform that have | not been declared an API. But when you want to exercise the | freedom you supposedly built with your platform, all these | edge cases fall back on you and inhibit change. "We can't | change the ingress controller, we rely on this implicit | behavior of it" "You can't change how database credentials | are provisioned, we pulled these from the Cloud SQL console | and comitted them to git". And facilitating any change as | soon as you _can_ cover the use-case is a fight with | stakeholders and POs that I usually have no nerve for. "Why | do we need to do anything??? It works?". And then you get | blamed when it breaks. I love this job. | JohnFen wrote: | As a dev, the whole "rapid release" thing made a lot of sense to | me. As a user, though, I've turned 180 degrees on it. I hate | "rapid release" with a passion now. Which means I dislike Agile | by consequence. | | Rapid release means I can no longer rely on the software that | engages in it. It's constantly shifting, with frequent changes in | UI and workflow, and new and exciting bugs constantly appearing. | | I miss the days when I could plan ahead for new versions, so I | could time them to have the least possible disruption to my life. | sokoloff wrote: | "Everyone wants progress; no one wants change." | wiremine wrote: | Small, "rapid releases" don't need to all go to the end user at | once. That's an anti-pattern for solid UX design. | | The classic "eBay color change" comes to mind: | | https://kulor.medium.com/how-ebay-secretly-changed-their-bac... | alexb_ wrote: | Easy when it's a color change, but this attitude is horrible | when it comes to anything functional. You stop being able to | learn how things work because someone wanted to make a small | tweak, and now you don't even get notice it's happening. | lazide wrote: | Sometimes even a color change IS a major function change | too, especially if you have business customers | tremon wrote: | Yes, they do? I thought the entire idea behind "release | early, release often" was to shorten the feedback cycle | between code changes and user reports so that it's easier to | fix the issues? | | However, not every code release needs to include a UX change. | I agree that changing the UX every week is a solid anti- | pattern. | philihp wrote: | Feature/UX changes should be behind feature flags, and | launched independently of a release. Releasing often let's | us identify and fix bugs quickly. I hear you that as users | we appreciate more stable UI, but to get to an intuitive | UI, you have to experiment and iterate. | | While there is value in discrete and planned releases, we | value responding to change more. | Silhouette wrote: | _I hear you that as users we appreciate more stable UI, | but to get to an intuitive UI, you have to experiment and | iterate._ | | But there is no rule that says you have to do those | experiments in production and annoy your paying customers | who don't want to see them. If you didn't insist on | releasing every five minutes you'd have time to iterate | privately. Successful software was made this way for | decades before modern web applications came along and | frankly a lot of it had better UI/UX than a lot of the | junk that gets pushed out today. | | _While there is value in discrete and planned releases, | we value responding to change more._ | | I suppose the question is what change you're responding | to. In this situation it seems like a lot of that change | and the need to respond to it are self-inflicted damage. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | Surely feature flags _are_ a way to iterate privately | even while shipping the code? | Silhouette wrote: | That depends on who gets to decide when the flags get | turned on, doesn't it? | zmgsabst wrote: | Intuition is learned patterns. | | You can't have an intuitive UI if it's constantly | changing so designers look productive in sprints: you're | constantly defying the intuition for your current | product, while giving users no stable target to learn the | behavior of. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | I hate it as a release engineer. The corners cut to do "rapid | releases" usually means sacrificing regression testing which | results in angry customers blowing up phones and inboxes. | barnabee wrote: | I like new releases when they mean new features and bug fixes. | Not so much when it's just a designer messing around with the | UI and graphic design or some "product manager" removing or | changing features on a whim, due to A/B testing or whatever. | | New releases should almost always only add features or fix | bugs. | honkycat wrote: | rapid release is better because the less you release at a given | time, the less that can go wrong. | | A lot of places just don't have the ability to maintain code | quality requisite to do the process properly. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | > I miss the days when I could plan ahead for new versions, so | I could time them to have the least possible disruption to my | life. | | That's one of the many advantages of desktop apps: unless it's | a bad player that forces the update down your throat, it is you | who control if and when to upgrade, not the vendor, who may or | may not have their interests aligned with yours. | | (It's a bit similar on the mobile if you disable automatics | updates, provided that you can ignore that obnoxious red dot | forever.) | MikePlacid wrote: | > Rapid release means I can no longer rely on the software that | engages in it. It's constantly shifting, with frequent changes | in UI and workflow, and new and exciting bugs constantly | appearing. | | There's something terribly wrong in the picture you've | described. I do not know what Agile stands for, but our company | was doing "a new version each Friday" for like 15 years. One of | the axioms of such a fast turnout was "a new version should | work in the old environment _exactly_ the same as the old | version" - except bug fixes of cause, some of which were made | optional nevertheless. | Aloha wrote: | I think this is a great point. When agile and rapid release | is done correctly, it should work out as "kaizen for | software" not "we overhaul our UI and workflow every 3-6 | months". | | Small incremental change is easier to test in most cases, the | issue is, changing software that was designed as a whole over | to incremental feature improvements is hard, because often | the existing bulk of code cannot be meaningfully unit tested. | AdrianB1 wrote: | Your company is doing it right, but that is not Agile :) | crazygringo wrote: | Counterpoint: as a user, while you realize you hate the | frequent changes in UI and workflow -- you're not realizing | that you're using software with a much better UI now _overall_ | than it would have been if not for the frequent experimentation | over the past e.g. 2 years. | | Rapid release and experimentation means ultimately finding | better solutions for the users faster. If you go slow, things | don't change as much but they don't get better much either. | | We tend to assume that all of the good changes would have | happened _anyways_ and all the bad changes are because of rapid | release.... but that 's not how it works. | plorkyeran wrote: | It is very unusual for software that's been around for a | while to actually have better UI than it did two years ago. | Every time I pull out an old laptop or phone running 5+ year | old software I notice that things _look_ different and | buttons are in different places, but functionally there 's | very little difference. | | Most changes to already functional software are just | _changes_. They aren 't improvements or regressions; they're | just making things different. | oceanplexian wrote: | Pick up a vintage Mac and a copy of Word from the 90s. The UX | is superior in every way to modern word processors. It's more | responsive, more intuitive, faster to start up, more | reliable, easier to learn, and so on. | | Decades of "experimentation" have not improved the act of | typing out a document in any meaningful way. Now, they have | improved the experience for the corporations who can profit | selling out their users data to the highest bidder and | locking them out of their own devices while charging a | subscription fee. | jameshart wrote: | The rose tinted glasses people have for old computers. | Here's a transcript of me using a Mac SE in 1995 to try and | finish writing a college essay in Microsoft Word: | | Chugchugchugchugchugchugchug | | Watch icon | | Chuchchugchugchugchug | | Disk eject sound | | Please Insert the disk 'Docs 1' | | Clunk | | Watch icon | | Chugchugchugchugchug | | Word count: 2351 | pdntspa wrote: | Why do you assume the changes automatically mean "much | better"? | | In my experience it feels about 50/50 for better/worse, | whether that is features taken away due to some business | concern, blatant contempt for existing muscle-memory, or | misguided designers reworking things that did not need a | rework. | candiddevmike wrote: | Your entire counterpoint assumes the UI improves... | Godel_unicode wrote: | This is an excellent example of the headwinds/tailswinds | asymmetry; we often don't notice when a rough edge gets | sanded off the UX but we scream when one gets added. | 411111111111111 wrote: | I disagree that ui changes in general are an example of | this. | | You'll be able to find examples such as that, sure. But | that doesn't make it generally true. | jacobr1 wrote: | One of the keys to rapid iteration is having a good | feedback-loop. So if there are UX regressions, they can | be rapidly identified and rolled back. | lazide wrote: | In my experience, that only happens when customer | attrition is double digits. Otherwise, everyone has their | head up their ass enough they'll ignore or spin the | feedback at 99% of organizations. | wizofaus wrote: | Short of having an army of testers whose job it is to | continually retest the same UX sequences with every | release, how is that possible? Rapid release to me | implies releasing changes faster than they could possibly | be manually tested. And automated tests are going to do a | rotten job of detecting most UX regressions. | torginus wrote: | You are posting on a site that is performant, light on | resources and has great UX - and has been mostly unchanged | for a decade. Its counterpart, Reddit has only regressed | compared to its biggest competitor, it's old self. I haven't | noticed _any_ significant UX changes in any software I use in | the past two years, and would struggle to name improvements, | even over a longer timeframe. | [deleted] | dntrkv wrote: | "Great UX" | | If HN had such great UX, there wouldn't be multiple browser | extensions (and clones) that focus solely on fixing the UX. | I'm not saying the UX is terrible, but I wouldn't call it | great. I think the best term for it would be "consistent." | It's basically Craigslist. It's fine if you've been using | it for years and have adjusted your behavior to work with | its quirks, but it does not provide a smooth experience | that would work for a community you're starting today. | mod wrote: | What types of changes would you make? | wizofaus wrote: | The grey text for posts needs to go, I always think it | means they've been downvoted, and is surely insufficient | contrast to be WCAG/508 compliant. | plorkyeran wrote: | Light grey text does mean that the post has been | downvoted below zero. | mod wrote: | He may mean the "visited link" color in the default color | scheme. | wizofaus wrote: | My understanding is that that's only true for comments | not posts? | lazide wrote: | There is no UX that is the best for everyone, there are | always trade offs that hurt some or help others. | | Just because there are other products with different | experiences that skin it doesn't mean _the core product | is bad_! | | It actually means the opposite - the core product has | such value and there are so many users, it actually is | able to support sizable enough communities of people | 'outside the core' to justify niche repackagings for | them! | pdntspa wrote: | Exactly this. Too many definitions of "great UX" seem to | focus on pulling in as many morons as possible because we | refuse to force people to learn how to use something | | Great UX should also mean fast, efficient, and dense with | information. Respectful of time, attention, and | intelligence. Not making an assumption of stupidity on | behalf of your users. | barnabee wrote: | 100%. | | Great UX should _primarily_ mean those things, at least | for a certain subset of software. | crazygringo wrote: | Frankly, HN has terrible UX. | | The default font size is unreadably small, it's impossible | to reliably tap on upvote without accidentally hitting | downvote on mobile screens, comments with code blocks with | too many characters in a line break the width of the | interface, huge comment threads indented 15 times aren't | collapsed by default, downvoted comments lighten to become | unreadable, I could go on. | | But there's no decent alternative for HN's content and | community, so we put up with the terrible decade-old | interface because we don't have a choice. Although people | are constantly inventing their own clients for it precisely | _because_ it 's so terrible. | barnabee wrote: | String disagree. | | The only of those complaints I even half recognise is the | voting buttons on mobile, but I miss them rarely enough | that I'd probably still rather not give up any more | screen real estate (horizontally or vertically) or add an | extra click. | | Otherwise HN has basically the UX I wish every site had. | JohnFen wrote: | This an interesting point. | | I would disagree that UI constantly improves, though. I can | think of lots of examples where the opposite is true. But | that's not due to rapid release, that's due to other issues. | | > If you go slow, things don't change as much but they don't | get better much either. | | It's hard to think of when I've seen improvements that were | so good as to be worth the cost, though. Things certainly | change, but change is not always better, and even when it is, | it's not always worth the cost to the user. | horsawlarway wrote: | I think you're missing an obvious dichotomy here. | | Better UI is _not_ universal. And the absolute, hands down | unquestionably best, UI that can possibly exist for any given | customer is the one they 're already an expert in. | | Can a different UI _end up_ being better for them? Sure. Will | it be better the day it 's released? No. | | The user has to pay a cost every time the UI changes, | regardless of whether it's actually better for them or not | (and it will _never_ be better until much later, once they | 've become an expert in the new version). | | Worse - I see more and more companies optimize UIs for the | "initial user experience" and onboarding new users (more | paying customers). The sad truth is that many times that | means dumbing down a much better UI for the "already expert" | customer - just like putting training wheels on the bike is | great for the person that's never biked, and utterly | infuriating if you already know how to ride. | | This is why existing customer bases are so rarely fond of | _any_ change - regardless of whether they end up liking it in | 3 months time. It has a real cost, right this second, and | they 're being asked to pay it. | lazide wrote: | It's also an existential risk for many business customers. | | If you already spent months training a new hire on how to | get something working with all the different random tools | and software they use, _changing something meaningful_ | means breaking that persons ability to do what they need to | do for their job, at least for some time. | | Even changing something inconsequential will confuse some | users for a bit, require making/updating new training | guides, etc. | | If it's a business on the edge or under during a stressful | period? That can literally tip it over and make it non | functional. That is especially true for small businesses. | crazygringo wrote: | Business productivity software is _usually_ much more | slow-changing than consumer software, precisely for this | reason. They know customers ' training guides need to be | rewritten so changes become a big deal. | | This is one of the reasons business productivity software | becomes unwieldy after a while -- it's fine to add | buttons and menus, you just can't change existing ones or | what they do. So then version 5 will finally introduce | the massive, desperately needed UI refactor after ten | years, while plenty of clients just stay on version 4. | (An example of this is the Blackbird CMS -- old Blackbird | vs new Blackbird.) | Silhouette wrote: | _So then version 5 will finally introduce the massive, | desperately needed UI refactor after ten years, while | plenty of clients just stay on version 4._ | | If your new product with ten years of improvements was so | unattractive compared with the existing version your | customers are currently using that they were choosing not | to update, what does that say about the value to the | customer of all those improvements? | | In the world before SAAS we saw both extremes often. Some | products had incredible dev teams and people would | upgrade relatively often even when each new version cost | extra money. Other products barely produced an | interesting change in several new versions over several | years and users mostly didn't pay for those updates. | | SAAS is a convenient business model for the developers in | the latter category because it locks in the ongoing | revenues whether any future changes add value or not. | They just need enough lock-in effects that once you've | signed up you can't easily move to one of their | competitors. | lazide wrote: | Yup, until eventually it becomes unusable due to the | sheer weight of cruft. | | Then, switch to new vendor or the next major version. | | Software Lifecycle for reals baby! | eastbound wrote: | - Agile - DevOps - Continuous integration - Continuous | deployment - Rapid release - Growth hacking, if you have 10+ | employees, A/B testing, heatmaps. | | I've been working alone for 12 years and all those concepts | were already working in the last large corp I was in. | | What trends am I missing by being disconnected from the | employment market? Am I missing anything or do we still develop | like it's 2010? Is there no new process or evolution on the | style of management of software? Is Agile the final form of | product management? | eastbound wrote: | The notable trend after DevOps was Kubernetes since 2020, and | the notable trend for the frontend was the generalization of | NPM-based programming, from React to Typescript, which | enabled larger teams and more stable UIs, at the cost of 1GB | of JS in the browser. | | But they don't seem as earth-shattering as missing the Agile | boat. | stcredzero wrote: | _> Which means I dislike Agile by consequence._ | | From the article: | | _If I were to generalize, I'd say most of the companies I'm | picking on fall into one of two categories:_ | They believe in DevOps ideas, but they're unwilling to invest | in changing their ways. They aren't convinced that some | of the scarier ideas (like deploying multiple times per day) | will help after all. | | Isn't it amazing how one could take "DevOps" and substitute | "Agile" and it would fit exactly? | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | I think a multi-pronged approach works best. A pipeline for | users who want the latest changes, and a more stable pipeline | for users who dislike change and mostly just want security | updates and bug fixes. | | The trick would be giving users more distinct choices. For | example, with something like Chrome the choice is between | extremely frequent and just plain frequent. They don't really | offer any long-term version. | colechristensen wrote: | There is a lot of software I've used where I would have been | just fine if all development stopped. I don't need or want new | features, keeping up with security fixes, bugs, and OS updates, | is fine, but feature wise many things I would have been happy | to call the software done. | | But that doesn't keep programmers employed, VC's making money, | or management justifying themselves. | | Frustrating. | NonNefarious wrote: | Yep. Word for Windows 6 was pretty much the end of the road | for word-processor improvement. It has been nothing but | regressions since, to the shitshow that is Word today. | colechristensen wrote: | I really liked iTunes at some point around 2006 and then it | got progressively worse, dropped my favorite features, and | I no longer touch it. | | All I needed them to do was improve performance for large | libraries. | mym1990 wrote: | I think this sounds like an issue with the change management | part of the cycle. It is also a bit of a chicken and egg | problem, where agile development has created an environment | where changing requirements from customer/user are almost | expected, and now we justify those by using agile more and | more. Apps also look to implement ever growing numbers of | features that no one really cares about, but sound like a good | idea in the weekly leadership call. | lazide wrote: | A lot of it is also out of control careerism, promo culture, | and short sighted product management. | | No one is going to say No to something new and sexy, | especially not the customers (since we won't ask them). | cjsawyer wrote: | I miss being able to actually refuse an update. Or even being | able to disable them! | dleslie wrote: | I miss knowing that updates even happened. I also miss | important features remaining stable. | | Which is why, for the most part, I've stopped using web-based | applications. | ethbr0 wrote: | You want a chuckle, turn off automatic app updates on an | Android phone and see how many prompts you get. And how | terrible the patch notes are ("Fixed some things") | actionablefiber wrote: | I wonder if developers who do this simply don't want to | publicly identify and take responsibility for bugs that | they introduced earlier. It's easier to just say "bug | fixes" then it is to say something like "I overlooked | several surprisingly common edge cases in the parser | module and have updated it to correctly handle several | character sequences that were causing exceptions to be | thrown." With automatic updates and vague update notes, | anyone who did not directly experience the bug never has | to know it existed in the first place and the developer | never has to admit it existed in the first place. | dleslie wrote: | In fact, my Android 11 device has no browser enabled, the | play store is disabled, and almost every app it came with | is disabled. It functions solely for email, instant | messaging, a TODO tracker, and taking photos. | | Edit: not sure why this was downvoted. Did someone find | the idea of a narrowly-focused phone to be offensive or | unworthy of discussion? | OkGoDoIt wrote: | Nowadays even on iPhone half the apps phone home to their | server, determine they're not running the latest version, | and then refuse to let you use them until you update. | bluGill wrote: | I have 25 applications on my android that never get | updated. I don't use gmail, and I don't want it installed | on my phone at all. (I have the mandatory account to | activate the phone, but all my mail is via fastmail). I | update the apps I use (or sometimes apps I think I should | use but don't) | jjav wrote: | > (I have the mandatory account to activate the phone, | but all my mail is via fastmail). | | Interesting, I don't have a google account associated | with my phone. It means the google app store doesn't | work, but everything else works fine AFAIK. I use FDroid | or just download apks directly. | techsupporter wrote: | Or that every ducking time an application developer pushes an | update, they feel the need to pop up something in front of me | the next time I open the application. The _worst_ time to do | that is when I first open the application because that 's | when I've made the intentional choice to use it to get | something done and the last thing I want is for that flow to | be interrupted. | | The irritation is tripled if it's an un-skippable "let us | walk you through the nineteen changes in a slowly constructed | slideshow!" | | This is second only to applications that don't properly | retain state--especially after an update--so every time I | open them I get a brief glimpse of what once was (and what I | probably wanted to go back to) before I get a 50/50 split of | being dumped to the application home screen or "oops, | something has gone wrong! lol, software, yannow! Please to be | logging in once more, thx." | kbelder wrote: | "We've improved the way you interact with our app!" | >click next. | | Cursor slowly moves to the upper-right corner of the | screen. "We've added a 'search by topic' functionality to | our help menu! No more need to scroll alphabetically!" | >click next | | Cursor slowly moves to the lower left corner of the screen. | A red circles appears, pulsing. "The toolbar now displays | the two-letter country code that your operating system is | set to. Useful for travelers!" >click | next | | Cursor slowly moves to the upper middle of the screen. A | popup appears. "If you have forgotten to fill out your | phone number and email address in the Account Options, a | helpful reminder will appear each time you start the | program. This will help you reap a number of useful | benefits that sharing your information allows!" | dleslie wrote: | If your feature requires a tutorial _for all users_ then it | shouldn't be shipped. | | I'm strict on this; I return video games with unskippable | tutorials. It's cause for an immediate Alt-F4 and return to | store. | barnabee wrote: | If it requires a tutorial for all users, that's called a | manual and it doesn't have to appear on launch or force | you to read it. Unskippable step by step tooltip guides | are the absolute worst. | | Many features are better off hard to find and left that | way than shoved-in-your-face discoverable, or introduced | by a tutorial. Those who want to get the most out of | their tools will find them and will appreciate you | treating them like fellow intelligent beings. The rest | will never know what they missed and won't worry about it | either. | ThunderSizzle wrote: | How does Left 4 Dead's style fall in to this (assuming | the intro vid would've required on first run) | | The tutorial is basically the intro video with some tool | tips periodically in game. | YetAnotherNick wrote: | Rapid release has nothing to do with shifting UI. You can have | constantly shifting UI even with weekly release. | vladvasiliu wrote: | I presume GP would call a weekly release "rapid", too. | | Given the tone of the message, I expect "non rapid" to mean | with a much longer time frame, and, most importantly, the | release must be controllable by the user. | jen20 wrote: | > most importantly, the release must be controllable by the | user. | | This is pining for a world which no longer exists, because | security patches must be applied to anything that matters | immediately. | lazide wrote: | There are things called 'branches' you know. | diffeomorphism wrote: | That is completely orthogonal and the whole selling point | of things like Windows LTSC or Red Hat: Stable | foundations with regular security updates but no | surprises. | Silhouette wrote: | It is possible to separate security updates and other | critical bug fixes from functional/UI changes. At least | it is if you're any good at software development at all. | The world would be a better place for users if more | software developers still did that. | | Of course you do need a strategy for maintaining multiple | versions of something in that case instead of just | forcing the latest version of everything you do on users | whether they want it or not. With the lock-in effects of | the always-connected web applications of today we all | know which option makes more money. | | I take some comfort in knowing that eventually most of | the developers that force unwanted changes on their users | will probably see their market share erode and lose their | dominant positions. It's just unfortunate that we have so | many quasi-monopolies in both essential and niche | software products that it's going to take a long time for | that to happen. | JohnFen wrote: | Yes, weekly is certainly rapid. | theptip wrote: | Yes, was going to post the same reply. Iterative UI, A/B | testing, webapp-driven (vs. installed versioned apps) are | completely orthogonal to the OP discussion of Continuous | Deployment / rapid deployment. | | CD is a deploy strategy saying the aspiration is to do one | deploy per commit, rather than batching commits and deploying | once per N weeks or whatever. It has approximately zero to do | with UX and product design/iteration approaches. | wizofaus wrote: | One deploy per commit for a product with large team sounds | insane - we'd easily have 50 commits a day for some hosted | components. Even deploying this often to the non-prod | environments is problematic (it takes a fair bit longer | than 1/50th a day for a start!), but doing that to your | customer-facing production sites sounds bonkers - what | class of problems is there that that's the best way to | prevent them? | YetAnotherNick wrote: | > customer-facing production sites sounds bonkers | | We came from very different lands I guess. Batching 50 | commits with no easy way of knowing which commit caused | the issue seems scarier to me, in case of an issue. And | if you code correctly and have warmup requests, your | deployment could be without any downtime. Obviously there | will be some extra resource usage because of unready | resources. | wizofaus wrote: | But if you're doing 50+ deploys a day, how can there | possibly enough time to know which commit caused whatever | issue that gets noticed anyway? If those 50 deploys are | done during regular business hours that's 9 minutes per | deploy on average! | YetAnotherNick wrote: | Reply to wizofaus: 9 minutes is more than much more than | enough to revert, at least in our setup. Specially if | some automated alert triggers, then we could revert well | within a minute. | wizofaus wrote: | I can't even begin to think how to get there, at least | using CloudFormation. | theptip wrote: | Yes it's aspirational, and of course you have to do | batching when the rate of commits gets too high. Many | companies don't actually end up at the end of the | spectrum with full continuous delivery; most of the value | is captured by building what's needed _to be able to_ if | you chose to, and doing say daily or hourly automated | deploys. | | If you're not familiar with the general arguments for why | CD might be desirable, a good place to start would be the | books Continuous Delivery | [https://smile.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment- | Auto...] or Accelerate | [https://smile.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing- | Tech...]. The TLDR would be that most deploy problems in | practice turn out to be because the process is manual, | infrequently-used, and/or unreliable, and by practicing | "if it hurts, do it more often" you are forced to iron | out those kinks. For example you can't deploy | automatically without a good acceptance/smoke test suite, | and without solid DB migration testing/linting/practices, | to name just two of many. You could just build all these | things without trying to do CD, but in practice it seems | that it's quite hard for organizations to prioritize this | work in isolation, and the goal of CD seems to provide a | fairly clear map to a much higher-quality deploy process. | The practice of deploying more frequently to flush out | issues, is also quite unintuitive as you note. | | Here's a (probably out-of-date) article on how FB did | deploys in 2017: | https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/09/facebook-release- | scale/ -- batched commits and staged canary rollouts | automatically cut and released every few hours. | wizofaus wrote: | Yes I do get the general argument for CD (though I have | issues with how universally it can be applied based on | the sort of BVT I've had to do for SaaS platforms I | worked on in the past, where it just wasn't possible to | safely release new versions of key components without | needing several days' worth of testing, most of which was | waiting for verification that interactions with banks | etc. had worked as expected). | JohnFen wrote: | > It has approximately zero to do with UX and product | design/iteration approaches. | | The connection is that if the commit changes how the | product works in a way noticeable to the user, then the | user must suffer the changes frequently. Since changes | incur a cost to the user, it's requiring the user to | constantly be paying those costs. | | If the deployment happened less frequently, then the user | would incur the cost less frequently, and perhaps in a way | they could schedule when to take the change on so it is the | least disruptive to them. | bluGill wrote: | I've worked with software that has to work. Our customers put | it in a lab where they beat on it in simulation for 3 more, | months - any bugs and they stuck with the old version. (which | is one reason land lines were so reliable in the 1990s) We | did a code freeze 6 months before release in hopes of | catching everything. | | Most software nobody cares if it works or even is possible | for untrained humans to use, and it shows. | morelisp wrote: | The glut of isolated B2C SaaS products/developers has | absolutely destroyed any communal valuation of "known | issues." True in-house heads still remember. | dllthomas wrote: | Do you feel like having different channels of varying | "stability" sufficiently addresses your concerns? | bombcar wrote: | Part of the problem is that so much of our "software" is now | just weaponized webpages. | | And so there is no "staying on windows 7" for SaaS. | [deleted] | [deleted] | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | It can in some contexts, but I've never seen a "release | channels" approach for e.g. a configuration UI. I'm not sure | if that's because it's fundamentally incompatible with | business needs or it's just not something UX devs are aware | of. | lazide wrote: | It adds a huge support burden to devs and UX, as they need | to support an increasing number of different UX versions or | basically never change anything (which is bad for their | career). | JohnFen wrote: | It's better than nothing, but it isn't really sufficient. | Typically, the "stable" channel still releases too | frequently. | | What would address my concern is if it were possible to skip | releases, however rare or common they are, as I wish. But | that raises an entirely different Bad Thing in the modern | software industry -- that security updates are increasingly | inseparable from other updates. | mint2 wrote: | Yes the end user experience is not good with too frequent | updates. Vs code asking me to restart every single week for | updates is just a bad user experience. I would much prefer | monthly or quarterly bigger updates. | damagednoob wrote: | Rapid release is fine but companies will try and cheat: | | 1. Release often | | 2. When a release goes badly (and they will) do some version of | '5 whys' and fix the root cause. | | 3. Continue to release often | | That step 2 is often missing and what usually happens is that | no engineering time is committed to the solution. Instead they | implement more process which costs nothing, doesn't solve the | issue and slows development. | lazide wrote: | Then when development gets slow, fire the laggards! | Frost1x wrote: | I hate both sides. Rapid development loops should be just that, | development. Bug fixes are fine because they tend to guarantee | functional consistency and no UI/Ux changes (unless it's fixing | one that was broken). | | Today it's just the wild west of people basically having | production not far sepeeate from development in terms of | changes. UI/UX changes are the _worst_ in this context. I | opened Venmo the other day and I had to waste 5 minutes because | someone decided they wanted to change the UI and I had auto | updates applied (shame on me I suppose). | | Do not change the interfaces with your users folks unless it's | truly broken. | jascii wrote: | I think one of the problems with the terms "Agile" and "DevOps" | is that they are pretty general and generic terms that they are | trying to cast very specific meaning too... | | "So you're saying you're not an agile team?" Sure we are | appropriately agile for our needs, no need to be rigid about | it... | AtNightWeCode wrote: | You go up at 5 AM in the morning. You ride your bike to a | customer. You pass some security checks like, known guy, yes, no. | You are shown to the servers in the cellar. Cause they are safe | there. You get access to the admin account after 2 hours. You do | some backup to a local disk. Somebody screams something but you | can't hear what because of the noise. You say yes and hopes it | was about coffee even though the room is like a sauna. Now you | pick up that CD and insert it. You are not allowed to use a USB- | drive because it is mutable. Some clicks and the installation | begin. And now you wait. | | I am pro-devops. | torginus wrote: | I'm confused about DevOps - I thought it was about dev teams | owning the infrastructure, testing and deployment pipelines, so | that there is no clear delineation between they person who writes | tests, the person who sets up CI/CD pipelines and the person who | codes the app. | | It has nothing to do with frequency of deployments, and it does | not mean that no ops team is necessary for running the show, it's | about team autonomy and better understanding of different teams' | concerns because everyone is doing a bit of everything. | honkycat wrote: | "DevOps" is a corrupted term. It just means sysadmin at this | point. | mikkergp wrote: | While I get the underlying argument you are trying to make, | there are definitely still sysadmins in the world who see their | job as administering systems, and refuse to look at anything | resembling automation. | bot41 wrote: | I think it means devs that write their pipelines themselves. | Someone else has to enable the devs to do that | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | > We need better definitions for these terms | | How about this? Let's describe levels of adoption. Think of the | "normal form" concept for databases. Each level has a strict | definition, and you can objectively observe which level you are | using. And not every level is appropriate at all times. | | So maybe a team could say, "we're at DevOps level 2," or, "we use | level 3 Scrum." | leetrout wrote: | Yes. I like this concept a lot. Maybe accompanied with a | landscape of verticals and how you progress in each one. | synu wrote: | I feel like devops became a marketing juggernaut then somehow | evolved into creating a third team, apart from dev and ops, that | does handoffs with both of them. | PedroBatista wrote: | > I think companies feel that if they aren't going to "do | DevOps", that they need to rebrand the term "DevOps" to mean | "what we happen to already do". | | > To me, the most egregious example of this is when a company | simply changes the job titles of all its ops people. John use to | be an "IT Operations" guy, abut now he's a "DevOps Engineer". | | This is so true it hurts.. | NonNefarious wrote: | Key points in this article: | | Stop using terms you don't (or can't even) define. "DevOps" is a | great example. | | Admit when something sucks. | draw_down wrote: | I see the point, but it's funny that the author lays out the | reason why this goalpost-moving is happening. | | As pointed out, you sound like an idiot if you're against Agile. | So it's a lot easier to get what you want if you just call it | Agile. | | I get that it's not intellectually rigorous or whatever, but good | grief, when has that ever mattered in business. Is there any | class of concepts that survives unblemished after contact with | reality? | rufflez wrote: | Agile is bogus nonsense - there I said it. | latchkey wrote: | Cool... what's your alternative? | rufflez wrote: | Software used to be built before Agile... | | Let's at least keep solution design and also get senior | engineers to help estimate | | And do away with daily stand up and bs rituals.. a meeting | is needed when it is needed, not for the sake of "following | the process" | kenrose wrote: | Yeah, iterate quickly, learn from your customers usage, | repeat. | | You're right, total rubbish. /s | stonogo wrote: | Your pithy dismissal leaves out hundreds of pages of | religious rites and project management dances which | invariably turn into productivity-sucking meeting overload, | unachievable goals, and constant product churn, effectively | alienating everyone from the developer to the user, leaving | only the managers satisfied. Like telling a college student | that communism doesn't work, any objection is met with | "well they're just not doing REAL Agile," skipping over the | fact that nobody on Earth seems to be "doing REAL Agile." | | Agile could just as well serve in the headline in place of | DevOps. | rufflez wrote: | This is not how it works in real life. Contracts are made | to the lowest bidder, there are promises to keep or heads | will roll. By iteration 10, your customer is fuming that | the half baked idea has more exceptions than handled | scenarios and the finger pointing begins. Also, forget | about architecture, performance, security and other pesky | little problems. I have never seen it play out differently. | | The biggest problem is that the person footing the bill | does not care about your story points or retrospective- and | I don't blame them for that | drewcoo wrote: | > Is there any class of concepts that survives unblemished | after contact with reality? | | We're not talking about reality, though. We're talking about | things consultants market to management. | tuckerman wrote: | I'm not sure I agree with the author wrt Agile. I've never been | on a team that did anything that resembled agile but I have | been on teams that actively pushed back when anything that | looked like it sort of resembled agile got floated. I'm not | saying its 100% bad but I'm not sure it has a universally good | reputation | draw_down wrote: | g051051 wrote: | > The ideas behind the DevOps movements undeniably changed the | software development world for the better | | I absolutely deny this. | nimbius wrote: | when John Willis explained it in 2016 devops had enormous | potential for the initiated. id guess maybe 10% of anyone who | says 'devops' does anything remotely close though. | | devops in 2022 means if youre a dev, youre expected to know the | bowels of the OS inside and out as well and be willing to spend | hours debugging it alongside your normal programming work. if | youre in ops? it means debugging someones undocumented middleware | from nine years ago while the front of site burns so "rockstar" | coders dont jump ship having to do it instead. if youre in dev or | ops, it now means standups where you sit down for an hour and | talk about where to put your story in jira or how to enter it at | all, and where you discuss broad strategy too. instead of leaving | after your status update, youre expected to stay. its just | another meeting now. | | and once boardmembers and leadership realized they could spare | themselves the crucifixion of any real accountability after a | breech, they turned devops into devSECops, meaning your infosec | team sits in awkward silence as you explain why double defined | nginx headers arent a feature and the same management team that | made them part of the standups also unilaterally declared ssl3 | can never be deprecated because customers. | encryptluks2 wrote: | This is my issue. Companies have commoditized the average | developer and now treats it like a average entry level role | freshnode wrote: | I think there is a third category - companies that have heard of | DevOps, think it means that the development team and operations | team talk to one another, which they already do (!) and shut down | conversations after that. | | I've come across this archetype in several contracting gigs and I | find it to be especially pernicious as it gives the incumbents | (who usually have more weight in the org) ammo to effectively do | nothing. | ciguy wrote: | DevOps has lost all meaning as the first paragraph in the article | says. Anything it says after that is just semantics. Everyone is | doing it on some level, but what that means to each company | differs widely. | itsmemattchung wrote: | I was one of the biggest proponents of DevOps (even started and | the DevOps orange county meetup) but ... after working at AWS for | 5+ years, my entire perspective shifted. | | While DevOps _does_ work in _some_ organizations, sometimes what | you really need to do is operationalize your software development | team. Don 't get me wrong, system developers/engineers/operations | are needed but for sometimes for a small four person start up, | the best investment is improving the development team's | operational posture (e.g. run books, alarming, monitoring). | dec0dedab0de wrote: | Which definition of DevOps are you against? and what changed | your mind against it? | NonNefarious wrote: | That was as much a bunch of meaningless jargon as "DevOps." | bot41 wrote: | > the best investment is improving the development team's | operational posture (e.g. run books, alarming, monitoring). | | this is devops | 0x457 wrote: | > for a small four person start up, the best investment is | improving the development team's operational posture (e.g. run | books, alarming, monitoring). | | But that's literally what DevOps is? DevOps isn't a special | DevOps team that writes terraform. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | The original definition of DevOps was what you describe in your | second paragraph - development teams being responsible for | operations. | | Now DevOps means "We've created a DevOps team! They do DevOps!" | Frequently its the managers of old school operation teams | changing their names to DevOps teams to get a promotion. | CoconutPilot wrote: | I always liked this early definition of DevOps: | | "Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly | enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer | and a technology point of view. The traditional model is that | you take your software to the wall that separates development | and operations, and throw it over and then forget about it. | Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it." - Werner Vogels, | Amazon CTO (2006) | | DevOps meant that Developers are also responsible for | Operations. But that meaning is lost to time, just like | hacking meaning programming. | jen20 wrote: | It may seem pedantic, but it's an important difference: | that's _not_ what the original definition was. Instead, it | was a cross-functional team of developers and operators being | responsible for a whole system. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Yes, I should not have said a "development team", as it | makes a distinction between "people who create new | software" and "people who run that software in production | environment". Your definition is better. | calvinmorrison wrote: | > development team's operational posture (e.g. run books, | alarming, monitoring. | | Isn't DevOps in large part forcing the developers to have | responsibility over the code they push and giving short and | frequent pushes to easily rectify problems? | | Making developers do support work reduces support in the long | run because they'll get frustrated and automate solutions. | stetrain wrote: | Yeah, I feel like the term has been taken over to mean using | kubernetes and having continuous deployment pipelines for | your microservices. | | My understanding of root of the term is about ownership and | responsibility, where the team that develops the app also | owns how the app deploys and runs in production, including | monitoring and responding to issues. | | If the team decides that the right way to deploy their app is | once every two weeks using a shell script and a zip file, | cool. As long as it's documented and monitored so you know if | it's working. | calvinmorrison wrote: | Yeah, what's worked well for me is having ops or security | people draw up guidelines (for security, it may be | something as trivial as require ssh key auth, for ops it | may be: write a script that matches an existing deployment | procedure and we can get your app up and running very | quickly). | lazide wrote: | And/or become burnt out and develop a severe 'learned | helpness' complex. It depends on the environment they're in, | and if they have the tools and support to be able to fix | issues. | | Many companies, they don't. | oneplane wrote: | There seems to be an increasing disconnect between the | marketing value of a term ("DevOps") and what we're actually | supposed to be doing, which might best be described as | blameless accountability. | | Even in information security it basically revolves around the | same things before you can even do any sensible work and | improvements to processes. - Know what you have | - Know where it is - Know what it is doing - Know | what it is supposed to be doing | | If you don't have any of those pieces you're just guessing and | hoping for the best. For software that might be "know what | services you are building, know where you're running them, know | how they are doing, know how they are supposed to be doing". | But if we call that "DevOps" is suddenly marketable. | aidenn0 wrote: | Isn't that list just "Ops" ? | lazide wrote: | The issue of course is those things are hard. | oneplane wrote: | They are only hard if they don't get the same priority and | attention you'd see in regulated situations. Replace | software or information security with "bars of gold" and | suddenly it's not so hard. | | That's because marketing why you should know the | what/where/how/why of your gold to business decision makers | is apparently much more palatable than abstract concepts | found in IT, even if the value is the same. | | If you get the resources (including time, money and | manpower) do just do it, it can be done. But you usually | don't get all three (and maybe not even one), and therefore | you're stuck with a task that cannot be executed well. | lazide wrote: | Did general aviation become cheaper or more available to | folks when it got more heavily regulated? | | Fatality rates dropped, but it basically froze the | technology and capability into the late 70's/early 80's | and locked in just a few companies. The overall number of | people working in that industry is tiny now. It's almost | a complete dead end. | | It's the classic trade off - cheaper, better, faster. | Pick any 2 if you're lucky. Most only get to pick 1. | oneplane wrote: | Yep, and that is generally also why IT is the way it | currently is. Most projects aren't all that complex (in | business logic terms), it's mostly CRUD interfaces and a | fancy viewer for the end users anyway. But industries | that are still on mainframes are almost completely the | opposite where every single element is tagged, | catalogued, tested, described and traceable at any point | in time. With a price, rigidity and lead time to match, | of course. | | On one hand we don't all want to buy mainframes, on the | other hand, doing it as cheap and unmeasured as possible | makes everything flakey, demanding on individuals to keep | it running, insecure, and opaque to everyone involved. | Too bad there isn't really any middle ground, it's almost | like it's either "pretend to be a mainframe" or "do it as | cheap as possible". | | Regarding the aviation analogy: it definitely doesn't | become cheaper due to regulation (it did become cheaper | due to subsidies), but I'd rather have a system that's | regulated (or forced) into safety than having it be | optional and left to a sociopath (i.e. a for-profit | publicly traded company - all the benefits of pretending | to be a person but none of the responsibilities or limits | to govern it - except the law and regulation). | plugin-baby wrote: | > for a small four person start up, the best investment is | improving the development team's operational posture (e.g. run | books, alarming, monitoring). | | Oops, I thought that was DevOps. | cortesoft wrote: | Yeah, to me, the core of the 'DevOps' philosophy is that the | dev teams owns the product end to end, meaning they write it | and are responsible for it in production. | fennecfoxen wrote: | That's actual-devops. Grandparent poster has worked at firms | which have abandoned all its lessons and just use it to mean | something like "regular old ops teams, but they use | software". So he's using the term like all the big companies | do, basically. | | This is also where you will find things like a "CI/CD" team | that doesn't do continuous delivery: they just build Jenkins | pipelines, and run them as part of the manual cluster bringup | every 2-4 weeks. Or "RESTful" to mean "APIs which use JSON | and HTTP verbs" regardless of any hypermedia. And let's not | even get started on "agile"... | jbverschoor wrote: | 'word', as they say | JamesBarney wrote: | Here's a 400 page book and a 12 week training course on all | the processes we used to implement Agile's "People over | process" principle. | Banana699 wrote: | Something something Goodhart's law something something. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Me too. | | In my experience it went poorly because us devs are now | handling our own deployments and building alerting systems | and such, but the "devops" people won't give us the level of | access necessary to do that with tools designed for the job, | so we end up building custom ops-related tooling into the app | and writing backdoors that let us use it without having wake | the ops folk. | | When you're accustomed to having to build everything you | need, and you're tasked with ops work, you end up reinventing | a lot of wheels in a rather weird way and compromising your | app in the process. Or at least that's what we did. | theptip wrote: | This really substantiates the OP's claim. | | Maybe we need to come up with a new term to be more specific. | "DevOps for developers" vs. "DevOps for operators" or | something like that. (DevDevOps va OpsDevOps?) | | I always took DevOps to be some combination of 1) applying | dev best practices to ops, which could still in theory be | done by a separate team, but more 2) unifying dev and ops in | one team/role, perhaps enabling developers to own it by | providing tools and abstractions that developers can work | with, and workflows that unify the processes and improve | collaboration by lowering cycle time. | | It seems that the "bad" DevOps is OpsDevOps where the old ops | team just gets some rebranding, and maybe some new tools like | Terraform. I've always found the "DevDevOps" approach to be | quite empowering. Giving developers a tool like k8s so they | can abstract away the hard half of ops, and understand the | rest. | mnd999 wrote: | All these processes are a template, a starting point. Begin there | and optimise and refine to suit your team and your environment. | Dogmatically following a process that doesn't work for you is | silly. | RHSeeger wrote: | I find the article somewhat ridiculous in that it takes the tone | that everyone thinks the idea in question are good. | | > They aren't convinced that some of the scarier ideas (like | deploying multiple times per day) will help after all | | For some cases, rapid deployment might make sense (purely front | end stuff). For a lot of cases, I'm firmly of the opinion that it | does _not_ make sense. I've never worked on a project that | deployed that often, and I don't feel the need to. I have | depended on services that deployed that often and "oh, sorry we | broke that, we'll fix it later; you'll just have to live with | permanently broken data" gets my knickers in a twist every time. | | > I don't buy into all the ideas behind agile, particularly some | of the Scrum-specific ceremonies. | | That's because a lot of the Scrum people present it as "the" | Agile. And a lot of the non-Scrum people are fairly convince that | Scrum is awful. To which the Scrum people present "no true | Scotsman" arguments. | | I'm all for the underlying "listen to your customer, listen | often, and change plans as often as necessary to make them happy" | ideas of Agile. But every "methodology and process" for it I've | seen completely loses that idea. It's infuriating. | 0x457 wrote: | I think your issue isn't rapid release cycle, but lack of | proper testing. | t_mann wrote: | If you have a separate DevOps role in your org, arguably you're | not doing DevOps. So probably most orgs aren't doing DevOps, at | least those that are talking about it. | the_jeremy wrote: | My team at Nasdaq (I work on other products, not the stock | exchange) does DevOps surprisingly well for not being a Real Tech | Company TM. I don't know that the business sees benefits, as it | meant that all of the devs on my team have had to learn | Terraform, Helm, AWS, and Kubernetes in addition to the actual | SpringBoot Java application code, so our feature velocity dropped | quite a bit, but it was fun to learn, and it's probably better to | have people who understand the full deployment and not just pass | blame between teams during incidents. | lmarcos wrote: | Oh man, that's the trap. I do like to learn new things, I | swear. But at work I want to focus on what I do best: feature | development. Sure, I do know terraform and k8s and what not | (because I play with them via my side projects), but at work | don't give me the Ops/Platform hat please! It's cheap labor | (your company doesn't want to hire a dedicated platform | engineer to handle terraform/k8s/etc. and instead assigns you | (the developer) that responsibility claiming "you are gonna | have fun learning" and paying you 25% more in the best | scenario) | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | I don't know if you're right or not, but I do think your | hesitancy mirrors why a lot of organizations are unable to | adopt DevOps fully: many people don't _want_ to wear a bunch | of hats. They just want to do their one thing, and I can 't | really blame them. | tremon wrote: | But I don't think the original DevOps (TM) specified that | every person was required to work on every part of the | stack? Just that you need to have full-stack skills and | responsibilities within the same team? | | That said, I probably wouldn't want to hire someone with | just one hat. It's ok to have a preferential hat, it's not | ok to refuse to wear any other. | BlargMcLarg wrote: | This sounds like a manager's ideal. It's a luxury to | demand people wear multiple hats up to the point the | market allows you to turn the luxury into a commonality. | If it was up to bosses, they'd rather have jokers ready | to switch from customer support, to development, to | sales, and back. | | It's ok until the market decide it is no longer ok. So | far, it looks like all these "hats" are complicated | enough for the average to make the market think twice | about demanding that combination of breadth and depth of | skills. | 0x457 wrote: | > But I don't think the original DevOps (TM) specified | that every person was required to work on every part of | the stack? Just that you need to have full-stack skills | and responsibilities within the same team? | | Then you have Ops person integrated in every dev | team/squad, then those Ops people have their own meetings | to talk about Ops things. Then there aren't enough Ops | people to staff every dev team (maybe they are on | vacation, perhaps just not enough in general), so they | start sharing them. Next they need to work on some | special Ops tasks, so they want to have their own board. | Oops, now you have Ops team. | | The point of DevOps is that the team is responsible for | code being shipped, and after they shipped it, so | everyone needs to know how to work in the stack that runs | your app (Kubernetes, Nomad, AWS Beanstalk, bare-metal | with Ansible or whatever it is you use). That means devs | don't go to some other team to fix their CI or CD | pipeline. | | I worked in a company that was doing DevOps, we had no | Ops team, we had a few people who only worked on infra, | but they were part of our team. We didn't call it | anything, it was just how to work, about 3/4 of the team | was capable of setting up infrastructure and working on | Jenkins. | | I also worked in the company that "did DevOps" had a | "DevOps team" and devs knew absolutely nothing about what | happens to their code after they did `git push` (that if | they knew how to do `git push` without asking "DevOps | team"). | | Another company "for sure did DevOps right", they didn't | have "DevOps team" instead they had "Infra team" and | infra team was responsible for bare metal provisioning. | Devs could write CI pipelines and stuff. However, devs | had zero responsibility for code after they shipped it - | it was infra team that would be woken up by nightly Pager | Duty alert. | spaetzleesser wrote: | Same here. I recently had to take on some more roles. It's | fun learning but I don't perform at the level I could perform | when I was mainly writing C# code. Its not even close. It's | good to have some insights into all aspects of the work but | somebody who can focus on one area but can perform there with | multiple productive of someone who constantly jumps around. | nont wrote: | This is also very true in the presales engagements by top | consulting firms under "Digital Transformation". These presales | teams would come and show, on paper, how great they are with the | agile practices, devops, microservices, you name it. | | However, it's a totally opposite story during the actual | implementations. I've witnessed that it took a top consulting | firm 4 months to provision a sandbox environment while being 1 | month away from the first release. When asked about their proud | DevOps practices, you'd hear excuses that are in the blatant lie | territory. They knew they could get by by managing the | stakeholders instead of really doing what they had promised. | paxys wrote: | I worked at a large internet company in the mid-late 00s, and the | typical team composition was a handful of developers, a product | manager, a designer (if you worked on customer facing UI), a | project manager (for large enough projects), QAs, and a SRE. | | _Every_ team had dedicated engineers whose sole purpose was to | place purchase orders for servers, set up and manage databases, | deploy changes, monitor uptime and more. And this was standard | practice across the industry, as soon as your company outgrew a | shared host. | | Even the thought of something like this would be absurd today. So | I'd flip the "no one admits they don't to it" around - your | company does DevOps already, whether you realize/admit it or not. | water-your-self wrote: | In the mid 2000s was the role referred to SRE yet? | | Facebook calls it production engineer, DevOps is broad/ im | unsure its origin, Google calls it SRE. | jbverschoor wrote: | Within non-tech companies, they call everything "the | programmer" | dilyevsky wrote: | Replace "purchase orders for seevers" with "apply terraform to | spin up VMs" and ditch the QA person and not much has changed | [deleted] | jzawodn wrote: | Yahoo? | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | I agree the terms have become pointless. I have been thinking | about opening an actual school for DevOps, or at least IT Ops. | There is virtually no education for it, but it's a complex | subject matter that requires years of experience. The SRE books | are a peek under the covers but leave so much unsaid that it's | really only useful at "doing operations", not digital | transformation. | | To properly build and run a high-performing organization, you | need to understand at least 1) the entire history (up to today) | of software development practice and production operations, 2) | all of the competing requirements of product design, development, | and operation, 3) architectural best practices, 4) the industry | standards that apply to the work, and 5) tech product-aligned | business management methods. | | Basically you need a generalist who has 15+ years experience and | has tried and failed at everything under the sun. I think of it | like carpentry before there was a building code, and before the | introduction of apprentices and licenses. Trying to build high- | performance orgs without a master builder to show you is like | trying to build skyscrapers after having built your own home (and | having never seen a skyscraper). Or worse, taking an old barn | (non-tech enterprise) and trying to build a skyscraper out of | that. Without a trade school it will continue to be just a craft. | robertlagrant wrote: | > If I were to generalize, I'd say most of the companies I'm | picking on fall into one of two categories: | | > They believe in DevOps ideas, but they're unwilling to invest | in changing their ways. They aren't convinced that some of the | scarier ideas (like deploying multiple times per day) will help | after all. | | Option number 3 is the biggest one for me: thinking that having a | separate "DevOps" team from the Dev team that does ops via modern | tools _is_ DevOps. That may be a good approach for your company, | but it ain 't DevOps. | mikkergp wrote: | This seems like an example of something similar to the no true | scotsman fallacy. (it's inverse) These ideas are supposed to be | aspirational, akin to asking "is it a true democracy" or "is it | really capitalism". I don't entirely object to the notion of | trying to be more precise, but gatekeeping "devops" or "agile" | also seems to sort of miss the point. | ipnon wrote: | SRE seems the better approach. Make an error budget, measure | reliability, stop releasing in favor of reliability engineering | if the budget is missed, use the free time reduce toil. DevOps | seems to degrade to disorganization because the incentives are | not aligned between product development and software engineering. | jameshart wrote: | "Make an error budget, measure reliability, stop releasing in | favor of reliability engineering if the budget is missed" | | These are all things that fall in the realm of 'ops'. | | 'Dev'ops is an approach to 'doing ops'. It is one that adopts | certain practices that are common in 'dev'elopment - such as | defining things programmatically, using automated repeatable | processes to generate work product, and using automated testing | and verification. | | So what you describe as 'SRE' doesn't seem to me to be 'not | devops'. Seems like a set of ideas that would benefit from a | devops kind of approach. | jedberg wrote: | If you think SRE and DevOps are opposed to each other, then you | might be doing one of them wrong. I headed up SRE at Netflix, | and our sister teams wrote the software and managed the tools | that enabled the developers to continuously deploy and operate | their own services. | | We were in charge of reliability, but we did it through chaos | testing and accountability, and enhancing the deployment tools | to warn devs that they might be doing something high risk, but | still letting them do it. | tootie wrote: | I think you've hit at the heart of the problem, but swapping | the DevOps model for SRE is robbing Peter to pay Paul. | | Last place I worked with a 100+ person tech team had more of an | SRE model. The SRE team were charged with reliability. They had | no incentive to delivery features or to improve developer | experience. As a result, developer tools sucked, there was s | rigid release schedule, every bug was met with a rollback. This | was probably an extreme case because the team was also not very | good, but either way it was a clear case of misaligned | incentives. | | The entire point of DevOps was collective ownership with a | shared goal of customer value that is function of feature | richness, quality and reliability. It's the Holy Grail of | efficiency, it's just really hard to build that kind of | culture. | ipnon wrote: | Seems like the sweet spot is DevOps style reliability | ownership with SRE style indicators, objectives and | agreements. | drewcoo wrote: | The entire article avoided talking about definitions of DevOps, | while rambling a lot about how we have different ideas of what it | means and how we need better definitions. | | I appreciate the alert that there's a problem here, but there's | no substance to the article. | eweise wrote: | I only do as much 'ops' work as required by the idiots in charge. | Its much more productive for me to be working on business | solutions than screw around with getting traces and logs into | datadog and figuring out all the permission issues in AWS. | Someone can specialize in that knowledge instead of everybody | needing to know everything. | mkl95 wrote: | Most SaaS are overcooked spaghetti floating on AWS alphabet soup. | A devops mentality won't fix them. | rr888 wrote: | For me devops was never a great idea. Ideally you want one team | to decide on the architecture. You do need front line ops, | ideally they'd take some ownership and write some scripts, but | the buck stops with one team for inhouse systems that is usually | developers. | benreesman wrote: | When I was a wee lad, "programmers" wrote software and sorta | tested it and then kicked it over the fence to "systems | administrators", who chain-smoked and were very, very un-woke. | | This was a bad system. | | To the extent that "DevOps" means anything, it's that the spheres | of capability and responsibility need to have tons of overlap: | SWE's need to be in the oncall loop and know how the filesystem | works, and SRE's need to be serious coders. | | That's it: everyone codes, everyone operates. We all automate | where feasible. | | Sidebar: What's with the crazy surge in BuzzFeed-style titles on | the front page? It's not a federal matter but it's not a slight | change YoY either. | kazinator wrote: | The test cases for Unix must have been kept on some tapes that | were lost, because a test case is hardly to be seen in the | historic sources you can find online. | spiralpolitik wrote: | DevOps (and Agile) both usually run aground on the same question | of trust. If you aren't willing to trust your delivery teams then | you aren't going to see the leverage that both practices bring to | an organization. | | And if you aren't willing to trust your delivery teams then your | organization has a much bigger problem than either DevOps or | Agile can solve. | tibbon wrote: | I also go to the gym 4 times a week, go to sleep on a regular | schedule and eat a balanced diet! | alexjplant wrote: | According to "The DevOps Handbook" DevOps is... | | > the outcome of applying the most trusted principles from the | domain of physical manufacturing and leadership to the IT value | stream. DevOps relies on bodies of knowledge from Lean, Theory of | Constraints, the Toyota Production System, resilience | engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, human | factors, and many others. | | Anybody that's worked in an organization that "uses DevOps" or | has "DevOps Engineers" knows that this simply isn't true in the | vast majority of circumstances. Too often DevOps is just a new | name for an ops team. "True" DevOps is all about aligning | incentives, sharing responsibilities, and fostering collaboration | between people who build and maintain systems whereas "DevOps" | (with air quotes) is just a new spin on being a sysadmin with a | greater emphasis on AWS and Terraform. | baobabKoodaa wrote: | Both the quote and your response to it read like word soup to | me. I have literally no idea what the point in either of these | are. | | Historically, the word "DevOps" meant that instead of having | separate "Dev" and "Ops" teams, the same people would do both | Dev and Ops work. | lazide wrote: | Which is what they're saying. | | Because they do both jobs, folks understand both sides, and | work together to make things work better end to end for them | and for customers. | | Alternatives include siloed dev teams that throw shitty | software that crashes in production all the time to an | overworked ops team that takes all the blame. | | And overworked ops teams that have gone pager-blind and only | care if a VP yells at them, so ignore all but the most major | issues - after they already happened. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | The fact that engineers are not taught those topics are why | DevOps has failed. We're expecting whole organizations to | magically improve when they don't understand how. I can | count on one hand the number of people I have met who | understand OP's comment. | lazide wrote: | Yup. Though like social studies, even if it was mandatory | education, I suspect 90% of it folks would immediately | forget. | | Ops is hard, and irritating, and a pain in the ass. | | It's also the process of _actually solving the customers | needs_. | | If someone can fiddle around cutting and pasting off | stack overflow without having to worry about it, most | will. | | I personally can't NOT be involved, but that's why my | resume looks the way it does. | [deleted] | rhacker wrote: | No one admits they don't do it because everyone does it. I have | worked at 6 different companies since I've heard that term and | all of them were able to deploy to an environment by clicking a | button on a CI/CD tool. Maybe I'm the outlier? | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | Anyone can deploy a file with one button. DevOps is what | happens when the app starts randomly crashing. | | If the site keeps humming along like normal, or the app is | automatically rolled back, or (rarely) the devs get a page & | quickly diagnose in production and apply a fix in 10 minutes, | and deploys don't randomly fail due to unpinned versions etc, | that's DevOps. | | If people start running around like chickens with heads cut off | and pointing fingers, that's not DevOps. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-29 23:00 UTC)