dielectrikboog

Hey, at least you didn’t get Cthulhu on the cover, like Andrew Lombardi’s WebSocket.

Take certifications. Not to get them, but because preparing for them will structure the learning better than anyone can in response to that question.

As you say: DevOps means a million things to a million people. That’s why I ignored the person who tried to explain to me that I had the origin of DevOps wrong. Nobody alive or dead is qualified to make such a pronouncement, because nobody knows. It is an amorphous blob that usually manifests as a weapon for developers to beat the operations disciplines out of their company, which is why I speak about it as I do. Given the overwhelming evidence that the interpretation I’m going after is the popular one, arguing over the definition of the term is pointless.

You’re conflating my argument with cloud ranting and assuming DevOps methodology is the only method to acquire more feedback from production by stating your last paragraph like that. I’m saying there are potentially others, but we are entrenching on this way of doing things, and people picked this particular way of doing things and started talking organizations outside “SV” into it. That conversation gets harder a second, third, and fourth time. The prevalence of COBOL reqs should warn you of this, and what DevOps will look like in about a hundred years.

I know what a hype curve is, and I made two substantive points to differentiate this situation from a hype curve. I’m not “bemoaning the pitfalls,” I’ll repeat that I’m concerned this approach, which is gaining traction and getting solidified and entrenched, will spook the decisionmakers on being willing to accept your 15-year solution when it comes along.

If you’re going to be as patronizing as you are, please at least read what I’ve written and respond to it.

For the better? I’m not asking out of preference, I’m asking out of actual conclusion: is trading the operational overhead of running LDAP for a usually homegrown, usually wobbly automated scripting soufflé that turns Make into a distributed system objectively better? Has nobody stopped to ask, is DevOps and CI/CD the best framework we can achieve? Did nobody think to ask before they told your agency it was the ‘right’ methodology and the objectively best way to build industrial, business process software in the government sector? Did the changing times come from ideology and belief or identified process gaps?

I ask because I think there’s something better. I don’t know what it is yet, but I want to find out. I’m worried about wastage in DevOps methodologies, a system where nobody is incentivized to care about the right things, going on to spook the policymakers on doing software before we find out if the DevOps and Cloud worlds, both, are objectively the best way to do software for their purposes. I strongly, strongly feel like the craft is on the wrong path, and persuasive successes in industry are getting to the right ears before we know if the discipline to efficiently handle agile infrastructure with today’s tooling is even possible. I’m not convinced DevOps will organically find the right calculus to spur the kind of systems research that took us to not only where we are, but that which will take us where we need to go.

Speaking of, I’m lazily glancing at Agile here as well but I’m not prepared for a coherent argument there, beyond pointing out that we now have better tooling for managing specifications, particularly formal and mathematical ones, than the waterfall development experiences that prompted agile thinking. We need more systems research, tinkering, rethinking POSIX, all of it.

Yeah, you do. It’s a shame pretty much every single cloud-native shop in existence, you know, doesn’t bother, and pushes out the people arguing for bothering. I’ve been at this nearly two decades, and I have yet to find engineers even running an Excel notebook of inventory, much less capacity planning. You know, because describe-instances and monitoring and Ansible and Chef and blah blah.

My role right now is telling a major government agency how much they’re wasting on Azure. You know, because describe-instances. It’s a lot, and I think there might be a business model in “let me at your API for a week and give me 10%.” I’d be retired by Labor Day.

Reminder: They’re sending Congressionally appropriated funds. To Redmond. And they’re not entirely sure why, in $millions of cases. Line up fifty startups that have had a Demo Day and I’d bet you’d find the same thing in fifty-one of them.

That’s the DevOps legacy: don’t mind the budget, because AWS, Azure, and GCP have our financial interests in mind and APIs are cheaper to staff than fiber. Parades of like-minded individuals came to D.C. and said “DevOps! Do it!” and the agencies are now increasingly beholden to organizations incentivized by profit and those contractors took their Innovation Award check and don’t return the “um, what now?” calls. That’s the mess I’m trying to help clean up, and it’s happening across every major governmental organ in the United States.

Call them SREs and cross-train SWEs into it. It’s not a toothless distinction even though it seems like one. You absolutely, positively will hire better staff with better deliverables if you frame the work as “a software engineer focused on operational integration,” which SRE understands more.

SREs like to build platforms for exactly the same reasons you’re touching. You sound like you’re halfway there already. I strongly suggest the Google book, with “I am not Google scale” written in Sharpie on the cover for help digesting it.

No, it isn’t an exaggeration. They ceded one particular competency, systems administrator, and now pay cloud providers to do it instead. The job didn’t go anywhere. Capacity planning, change management, peering, supply chain management, all of that stuff is still happening, they just willingly tapped out of it and took another job (probably because the DevOps people came in with a slide deck and hand waved them out of a job at the SVP level).

That is not evolution (nor an indictment of those people, importantly). The side effect, which literally nobody is paying attention to, is a future where computing as a concept is concentrating on a few major companies. Every every every every single person who says “why would I buy a rack? There’s AWS” is furthering that outcome.

Sounds like you’re going to be depressed when you learn how the entire Internet plane, all software engineering outside of “SV”, all IT, all government, and basically everything except your GitHub CI/CD adventure works, then. Sorry.

SRE was born of putting software engineers to work building operational software and automation tailored to an organization and application. In contrast, no matter what anyone says, DevOps was objectively born of replacing the operations discipline and career track with a poorly-understood tool economy and ongoing opex to a cloud provider. As you say, typical JavaScript engineers can’t be bothered to understand network capacity planning yet feel they are more qualified to take their application to production by deferring all decisions to cloud providers. Who all employ SREs/PEs, not DevOps Engineers, by the way, and there is a big distinction.

We have people who can handle the operational stuff. They’re called systems administrators, network engineers, yes, even SREs, and other folks who are really good at understanding how computers and the Internet actually work, and a webdev bootcamp gives zero context into exactly what they do. None. Then, your ten-head startup suddenly scales to needing a physical footprint because it will literally save 80% of opex, and all your DevOps Engineers say “but why? There’s AWS,” and you’re in Medium hell for weeks arguing about it.

Apropos, if I interview you and find you have written a thoughtpiece on Medium about how “sysadmin is evolving” and it’s “time for the gray beards to learn code,” you do not get a call back. That has actually happened, and no, sysadmin is not evolving. I know staff-level “full stack engineers” who can’t tell me what an ASN is. The motions in the industry have merely made those people more in demand at a few companies and served to cement their position as “where computing gets done”.

Expect serious, existential operational threats and breaches to rise dramatically as DevOps continues to “win,” and consider it a smart strategic move to avoid DevOps culture in the long term. If you write a req called “DevOps Engineer,” I don’t even know what to say to you.