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Comment by sargram01 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s because ops folk cobble together scripts and tools only to scratch the current itch, rather than think through the whole problem and design and write software to solve it. Testability being one of the biggest sins I’ve seen in ops, tools like Ansible encourage changing systems at run time with complex logic tied to specific deployments for example, they don’t use IDEs so there’s no way to jump through the yaml files, get inline help, know which playbook is run when (it’s like a program with 100s of main()), no integrated debugger. It’s like the previous 50 years of computer science never happened and they’re starting back in the 1970s.

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A little thought exercise: your comment from the POV of a ops person explaining why they look down on devs.

Dev folks often take weeks to make even a small change. It doesn't matter how urgent the need is or how badly the business needs some kind of workaround, they over-complicate every problem, and ops has to spend more time in meetings planning their next project than it would have taken for us to put a working fix to be in place. Maintainability is one of the biggest sins I've seen in devs, tools like npm encourage devs to use an overly-complex chain of 3rd-party dependencies for even small projects, and they rarely ever update their dependencies after initial deployment, so if a security update to an underlying package is required or if the underlying has to be deployed to a new underlying system or container changes, things can break easily. They depend on IDEs for everything, and can't even use commonly installed system tools like awk or sed when, or use netstat to debug simple networking issues. It's like the 1970s never even happened and they never even learned what an operating system is.

Just like developers cobble together apps that are barely operable. Hard coding IP addresses, opening connections with no timeouts, and lacking basic understanding what the difference is between DNS and HTTP.

at one point, I assumed hard coding IP addresses and paths to /home/user/whatever/ was a just a web dev thing

spoilers: it is not just a web dev thing

Great post! You touched on something there thats been bugging me last few years, testing is non existent in devops/sre world so developers who hate testing and do not understand it is core to good engineering seem to gravitate towards devops roles as they can hack their way thru their day all while creating tons of tech debt.

Testing is basic in devops/SRE. How are you going to ensure reliability if you cannot test the shit out of it?

The issue is there’s no formal tool or practices for testing in ops. DSL languages are limited forcing you to use several for different kind of scenarios. At the end you need to rely in a real programming language to parse different format files and ensuring your variables are correct. I think developing software for operations is exciting which is going to mature with time. Kubernetes(and its CRD) is a step forward

> The issue is there’s no formal tool or practices for testing in ops.

There is though, it’s called writing normal software. Kubernetes can be framework to build on, with actual developers who design from high level logic down through to the implementation.

Chef had great support for automated testing. We also generally did a lot of testing on other tools.

Sure, things like ansible lack proper testing support, but that doesn't mean that all of the profession doesn't test.

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