
"DevOps is ruining my craft" - atatiyan
http://tatiyants.com/devops-is-ruining-my-craft/
======
johngalt
Obviously the satirized sysadmin has never read TPOSANA. Automation and
consistency are highly regarded in the sysadmin field. I've seen significantly
more casual attitudes towards operational needs from the development side of
the house.

DevOps was a term created because other titles have been watered down. Any
real sysadmin has been automating deployments, updating, backups, and
failovers for over a decade now. Don't claim we aren't sysadmins anymore now
that it's getting interesting.

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klochner
Satire. Come on people, I know it's early but this is hard to miss:

    
    
        Sure, you might get your precious “predictability”, 
        but at what cost? I mean, can you even still remember
        that rush of intrigue and anticipation you get when
        your application refuses to work on two of the twelve
        servers it was deployed to? The thrill of the hunt as
        you figure out exactly which configuration settings are
        different and, of those, which one is causing the
        problem? The sweet taste of relief that you get after
        hours upon hours of debugging finally narrowed it down
        to a rogue registry setting?

~~~
peterwwillis
I know, right? When he suggested that DevOps people would somehow get complex
server management right just because they have a python interpreter I nearly
fell out of my chair.

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snorkel
I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't
allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of
"stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding
about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time.
Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept
asking why we couldn't we be more "agile" and deploy new features everyday
like Facebook, why can't we do that? It wasn't even worth answering.

~~~
cunac
why would you need to have access to prod ? Your development/staging
environment (not local box) should be same as prod in most aspects except
capacity so your push to prod is 2 step process developer -> staging -> prod

~~~
ww520
You can't reproduce a dev/staging environment with the same traffic pattern,
user behavior, and request load as to a production environment. Google bots
won't crawl your dev/staging environment and you won't know its impact until
you see it. DDOS attack won't happen in your dev/staging environment. Click
fault won't happen on dev/staging.

Developers probably shouldn't have root privilege on production but they need
to have read access at the very least. They also should have write and
deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment.
Whatever mess they made there should be counted under acceptable loss.

~~~
jefe78
No disrespect, but after a statement like this, "...deployment privilege on a
few production machines for testing and experiment.", I wouldn't let you near
my servers. That's not what a production server is for.

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jetsnoc
Too funny. I sure hope this is satire. Personally, I find writing chef
recipes, building cookbooks, defining roles and managing the attributes of
systems to be more of a beautiful art and craft than managing systems
individually. To me, automating infrastructure feels more like a beautiful
masterpiece than building one-off servers that are poorly documented and
rarely configured the same.

It's an amazing thing to "knife vsphere vm clone" and "knife bootstrap" a
system! Even though I built and implemented our automated architecture I'm
still amazed every time I have a precise production system in under 5 minutes
servicing client requests.

I think Chef may have found the equivalent to my systems administration G-Spot
=P

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ericmoritz
I get the same feeling now that I've adopted TDD. I've lost that magic of
spending most of my time debugging code.

Now I just define the outcome I want, assert that a unwritten function
produces that outcome and code the outcome. _Sigh_ /s

~~~
mahyarm
You forgot about interacting with third party code that you have no control
over. Like when you develop any mobile app.

~~~
idunno246
They really are all crap. Run leaks - playhaven, tapjoy, flurry, etc are all
guaranteed to be there. They dont even run static analyzer, which find some of
these.

~~~
mahyarm
I was also talking about vendor libraries, like iOS UIKit and so on.

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1123581321
The title should be updated with a [satire] tag.

As to its content, I would say that server administration as a craft has moved
up a level. It is now developing programs like Chef, designing 'clouds',
choosing hardware and so on.

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mikesaraf
Two words: Artisanal Servers

------
jefe78
I chuckled at the obvious satire. However, I have heard of 'sysadmins' that
are complaining with less humour in their voices. The 'pure sysadmin' role is
alive and strong. Those being forced out by devops are either not very good or
the organization's culture is at odds with what a true sysadmin is expected to
do for them.

Also, in before, "Lol, Windows admin". I cringed when I saw a registry
reference.

~~~
johngalt
For a long time I kept waiting to meet these "job security" sysadmins. The
stereotypical 'if things worked better they wouldn't need me' guy. Haven't met
him yet. Most admins I've met are automating everything that is reasonable.
Many are automating MORE than is reasonable.

The only disturbing trend is how far the helpdesk types get in the hierarchy.
My shock at introducing an _IT Engineer_ to ubuntu, only to discover he'd
never used a CLI on any system...

~~~
jefe78
Any sysadmin going the route of 'job security' through obscurity(i.e., no
automation or documentation) should be classified as criminally negligent.

My speciality is disaster planning and recovery. I consider myself being hit
by a bus a potential disaster. That freak occurrence should not mean the end
of a business.

And don't know those helpdesk types who have never touched a CLI. They allow
me to bill a fortune when I step in to fix their botched deployments.

------
seanp2k2
IT: adapt or die

------
robertskmiles
> I too consider myself an artist and a craftsman of server building. With
> each click of a mouse, I create a work of art.

I... You're setting up servers with a mouse?

~~~
jefe78
Haha, pretty much. He also referenced 'registry' tweaks. Windows admins...

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hack_edu
I don't understand where this sysadmin is coming from. From a practical
perspective, what's the point to drive the wedge between DevOps and
'traditional' sysadmin work. He's just critiquing the work of fellow
administrators. They are BOTH sysadmins. Just as higher and higher level
languages come out, higher and higher level abstractions of administration are
required. With greater complexity of systems, more administration is
necessary.

Deployment is so much more complicated today than it was just a few years ago.
What we call 'DevOps' is really just a subset of systems administration work.
Every developer (yes, sysadmins are developers) has specialties regardless of
the term of the week.

Edit: Care for a reply with that downvote?

~~~
cpfohl
It wasn't my downvote, but I'll bet it's because the article is satire and
your response didn't quite catch that. ;)

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windexh8er
Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand - few do it that way
anymore, and those who do are premium brands, built for very specific purposes
wherein it doesn't make sense to automate those things. If cars were built all
by hand, one by one, by "artists" they would not be affordable or as reliable
as they are today. There is consistency, there is scalability, and there is
reference in automation.

Do you think Amazon builds one compute node at a time? You may think it is
art, but you can conversely look at a very sterile, well built environment
where there is no room for error as art as well - something produced by
DevOps.

Finally DevOps threatens nothing, at least nothing that shouldn't be. It
promotes progress. Why? Because if your skill and craft is so good, why not be
able to push it to the masses. And if you want to remain in the realm of niche
then find the players that need one-off art. Past that, DevOps is long
overdue.

DevOps hasn't ruined anything. Get over sysadmin as "art", otherwise I have
unicorns and rainbows to sell you. Sure, there are good sysadmins and bad, but
it's a stretch to say that you're so good your job can't be replicated with a
build framework that fosters sane and repeatable process.

~~~
maratd
So, that piece was satire. Unfortunately, satire is frequently used to attack
the opposition without actually having to make a cogent argument.

> Get over sysadmin as "art" > Building platforms is akin to building cars by
> hand

Uhhh... no. My server _is_ art. Now, I built my own build system, so do I
really build servers by hand? No. But I built the build system. And I
configured it. And it produces a server that is _exactly_ to my specification.
Down to every single file.

After the build? I click save. Then I duplicate. Then I have lots and lots of
servers that are built to my _precise_ desire. That's art.

Is my system more performant and secure than the system you built with:

(your favorite package manager) install (all the shit you need)

Yes. By a lot.

(chef or whatever off-the-shelf build system) install and configure (all the
shit you need)

Yes. By a little.

But, hey, you know what? It's my server. And it's exactly the way I want it.
And there's value in _that_. I own my stack.

Which makes writing software for it more fun. By a lot.

~~~
windexh8er
"Is my system more performant and secure than the system you built with:

(your favorite package manager) install (all the shit you need)

Yes. By a lot."

You should take a look at DevOps.

