
AWS does not protect you from devops - lkrubner
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/aws-does-not-protect-you-from-devops
======
jnwatson
It sure doesn't protect you from devops at all. What it does do is allow you
to take your small devops team of 3-4 and allow them to operate at tremendous
scale.

------
bdcravens
The bulk of the article was based around ElasticSearch, which is one of their
more awkward-feeling services (for instance, locking down by IP address takes
several minutes to deploy, whereas the rest of their services are configurable
via security groups in seconds)

I don't think the AWS story has been protecting you from devops, but rather,
protecting you from infrastructure.

~~~
deanCommie
Not all AWS services are created equal. Not all have the same sizes of
team/funding/investment into new features.

~~~
bdcravens
As a customer, I pay one bill. If you look at the pricing of services that are
just value adds atop EC2 (like ElasticSearch and ElastiCache) it seems that
AWS seems they are comparably mature.

------
comprev
>There might be reasons to use AWS, but please don’t use it because you think
it’s going to save you a money that you would otherwise waste on devops. If
you use AWS, your contractors will still end up doing a great deal of devops.

This last bit alone shows the author doesn't really know what/how DevOps
works.

------
bitanonymouse
Google Cloud provides way more hosted services that _do_ protect from devops.
App Engine is fantastic (though it can be pricy). Similarly BigQuery "just
works" vs. Redshift's need to choose instance sizes and scaling policies.
Nearline is zero effort vs. Glacier's need to issue restore requests. (and
Google seems to have a better container story too) Also GCS has multi-region
buckets (and I believe GCP auto-migrates VMs too). You can do multi-host
shared FS more easily, etc.

------
uji
I don't agree with this article. Lets say a company was managing a mysql like
database by themselves which would require a full time database maintainer
doing all sorts of devops work. However, if company moves to AWS and starts
using RDS, it might only need a part time db maintainer. So company indeed
save some devops work like pushing security patches, monitoring etc.

~~~
lkrubner
And yet, my current client is using RDS, and they still have devops work, in
terms of ensuring that the failover is setup correctly, the tables are
correctly indexed, the IP whitelist is kept up to date, etc.

You could argue that using RDS means they face less devops work than if they
ran MySQL on their own dedicated servers. That might true in some aspects, but
then, with RDS, you also need to keep track of some issues that are specific
to AWS. Availability zones, regions, management via console versus the AWS
CLI, management of the keys, etc. So there is the question, which you must ask
yourself, and your team, do you want to be learning skills specific to the
technologies you are using, or do you want to be learning skills that are
specific to AWS? Would you like to deepen your knowledge about MySQL, or would
you like to instead spend time memorizing the various decisions that Amazon
has made?

I'm not suggesting that there is a right answer, but I am suggesting that the
answer is much more muddy and nuanced that Amazon's marketing suggests.

~~~
sjellis
"So there is the question, which you must ask yourself, and your team, do you
want to be learning skills specific to the technologies you are using, or do
you want to be learning skills that are specific to AWS?"

If you are running a commmodity product like MySQL with the AWS hosted
offering, then AWS is effectively replacing the network, server hardware and
server OS layers that your organization would have to acquire and manage some
other way. It is definitely true that it requires a different set of (non-
trivial) knowledge, but the time and cost of acquiring them is significantly
lower than for learning equivalent on-premises infrastructure. The MySQL
knowledge is more of a fixed constant, since you need that regardless of how
you host the databases.

It is definitely true that if you invest AWS/Azure/GCP, then you still need
some Ops-orientated people, and many developers don't have much interest in
it. There is an issue of Dev and Ops being different mindsets.

------
pram
Has devops just come to mean, uh, ops? lol

