Comment by jhawk28 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhawk28 | Hacker News Reader

DevOps is dead because it's run by a bunch of ops people who don't know how to do dev and a bunch of dev people who don't know how to do ops. The only tooling problem is that a bunch of companies created "DevOps tools" that then get dictated to use: K8s, terraform, etc. The only way this works is if you build the application to fit within those frameworks. Writing an indexer that is massively parallel and is mainly constrained by CPU/Memory. Instead, you have devs building something that gets thrown over the fence to a devops team that then containerizes it and throw it on K8s. What happens if the application requires lots of IOPS or network bandwidth? K8s doesn't schedule applications that way. "Oh you can customize the scheduler to take that into account". 2 years later, it's still not "customized" because they are ops people who don't know how to code. If you do customize it, the API is going to change in a few months which will break when you upgrade.

Would you say it's truly dead or that it fails to meet the performance bar you've described?

The reality is that most devs do not consider a holistic picture that includes the infrastructure they will be deploying to. In many cases, it's certainly a skill issue; good devs are hard to find. And to flip the coin, it's hard to find good ops people too.

The reason DevOps continues to linger, however vague a discipline it is, is because it allows the business to differentiate between revenue generating roles and cost center roles. You want your dev resources to prioritize feature work, at the beckon of PMs or upper management, and let your "DevOps" resources to be responsible for actually getting the product deployed.

In essence, it's a ploy to further commoditize engineering roles, because finding unicorns that understand the picture top-to-bottom is difficult (finding /top/ talent is difficult!). In this way, DevOps is well and alive, as a Romero zombie.

There are not very many ops people who cannot code. Especially these days. I spent at least the last 20 years doing ops. Ops people are HIGHLY motivated to create things that DON’T FAIL. However, ops teams are often blocked by MANAGERS from doing essentially development in the prod environment. I’m talking about tools and scripts. At the places I’ve worked with the highest uptime, it was because ops had an unlimited, unfettered free hand.

Remove the handcuffs from your ops team and your reliability will SOAR.

Average ops have never been less capable and adverse to programming than now. The problem is getting worse, not better. I know because I am in ops and one of the few who loves to code and accidentally entered the field

But the same is true of devs. Many of them are pretty clueless about coding. It's a whole generation of "bootcamp people" who were designers or bartenders and heard there were more lucrative jobs.

I think that any kind of “modern ops” necessarily includes coding, even if there isn’t a ton of Python or Rust being generated as part of the workflow.

Kubernetes deployment configurations and Ansible playbooks are code. PromQL is code. Dockerfiles and cloud-init scripts are code. Terraform HCL is code.

It’s all code I personally hate writing, but that doesn’t make it less valid “software development” than (say) writing React code.

These things are not nearly equivalent. It’s writing code, it’s not software engineering.

Correct, it’s systems engineering.

It's configuration management, systems engineering is low level imo

I think you have it backwards. Systems engineering is the big picture discipline of designing & managing complex systems while config management is a specific process within that.

No way. I have worked in ops for 20 years now; almost everyone knows how to code. Some enjoy it and some don't, but people are capable of it and will do it when needed.

I agree many can code, though a subset are certainly more scripting than engineering (like a typical 3-tier app)

There is also a subset that is very allergic to coding at this point. I've interviewed enough to see people who only know HCL/yaml. There is enough need and work (waste?) in the space that roles like this can exist

I see where you were coming from now. That sounds more like the Infra team. There are ops teams who are segmented in different ways. In my ops team, I don’t touch the infra and they don’t touch the applications.

This is a red flag. You should find a new Ops team to work with.

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