
Ask HN: Is one-man-devops a realistic project? - llvmlibs
My firm (fintech based, medium-large enterprise) is stuck somewhere in the middle of a large scale tech transformation - two years in, and right now the end is no where in sight.<p>Our system&#x2F;ops guys (~50 people) are generally smart and nice people - but they&#x27;re the classic victim Ops dudes that got renamed to DevOps overnight.
They went from scp&#x27;ing bash scripts to bare-metal to AWS and Kuberenetes and all that jazz and are basically &quot;winging it&quot;.
The rest of the frim (few hundred devs, business&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;support) are either blissfully unaware or getting increasingly frustrated as deployments remain a coinflip for success.<p>I am (or was) the dev tech lead here, and recently quit mostly due to some of the frustrations mentioned above.
I&#x27;ve already secured an offer from &quot;tech giant X&quot;, and intended to move in a few days.
As a &quot;counter&quot; from the CEO - I&#x27;ve have the option of creating a new division, with the initial goal of redoing the entire stack.<p>I have a free hand in hiring&#x2F;strategy, except from within the company.
It&#x27;s super hard to recruit here due to location and strict security requirements, meaning that for 6+ months I&#x27;d be &quot;alone&quot;.<p>The goal is a production-grade Kub cluster on AWS with the accompanying ecosystem.
That includes most of the SOA-enablers - full CI&#x2F;CD, multiple segregated envs, monitoring&#x2F;logging, service catalog, etc.
When it&#x27;s &quot;ready&quot;, we handover the day-to-day &quot;back&quot; to ops. 
My division goes on to bigger and better things - whatever I&#x27;m into.<p>I have a very solid grasp on things required on the dev side, but the overall AWS architecture (networking, security, etc) is not something I&#x27;ve dealt with.
Some things can be handed over to managed solutions (e.g. KMS), but strict regulation means not all. EKS&#x2F;Tectonic and such are probably not an option.<p>Those of you with this kind of transformation behind them - is this a realistic goal for 1-2 non-ops people to learn and an implement within ~1 year?
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cimmanom
I don't know how realistic that is, but if you're going to try this, I'd
recommend the following: as a prerequisite for your doing this they have to
permit you to straight off the bat recruit two people internally from the
existing sysadmin team.

One should be someone with a deep understanding of the bare metal networking,
security, etc. concerns, who's enthusiastic about learning how that translates
to an AWS environment. S/he will advise you to make sure you get that part
right, and hopefully pick up enough to pitch in to design and build your
infrastructure.

The other should be someone with a strong understanding of the old bash
scripting who's interested in learning modern devops scripting. They'll help
you translate the old scripts to new paradigms and eventually help you build
out the rest.

Both of these people will have to be fast learners willing to spend the first
month or so learning the essentials. Make sure you have funding from
management to support whatever video tutorials, online courses, etc. they need
to get up to speed.

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dozzie
> Our system/ops guys (~50 people) are generally smart and nice people - but
> they're the classic victim Ops dudes that got renamed to DevOps overnight.

That's just a name change. "DevOps" is just the same system administration as
it was for the previous 20 years, the difference is just that now we have more
tooling, services, and deployment methods. Why "victim dudes"?

> They went from scp'ing bash scripts to bare-metal to AWS and Kuberenetes and
> all that jazz and are basically "winging it".

OK, so they got virtual machines, somebody else's data storage and processing
services, and tooling for containers suddenly dropped on their lap, so they
need to modernize their craft. And from what you describe, they weren't that
good in the craft to begin with (IaaC is an idea twenty years old, the same
with packaging software, and just these two techniques can easily handle
growth from a few machines to dozens or hundreds).

> [...] is this a realistic goal for 1-2 non-ops people to learn and an
> implement within ~1 year?

Probably not. For building a robust infrastructure you need somebody who
understands well how the OS and networks work and what mechanisms the OS
provides, which usually means a good and experienced sysadmin, not a
programmer. It's not impossible for a programmer to _learn_ that, but it
requires a good mentor, and then you're still left with an _implementation_.

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amirathi
I am an engineer who recently managed DevOps at a decent scale (traffic wise)
startup. ~1 year is a long time so I think it's do-able. As somebody mentioned
here do start with a small team right off the bat. You will be making lot of
tooling decisions & without a team/discussion those will likely be based on
quick surface reading.

If I were you, the question I would ask is do I want to go through this
struggle? Would I enjoy it? DevOps has it's own frustration moments (little
more than programming) & Aha moments. Not everyone enjoys it, so ask yourself
that question first.

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fmovlex
This is pretty funny, because I'm in an incredibly similar situation. From my
experience, most of the development-oriented things you need is hard but not
unrealistic.

However, "production-grade" is a term more easily thrown around than
implemented, especially in the financial sector. I assume hiring consultants
from that is not an option?

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sharemywin
Why not respond back with ~1 year once you have a team in place.

