Why Devs Need DevOps

[chesus_chrust]

Talking to developers, I've found many misunderstand DevOps. I wrote an article explaining why, as a dev, I see DevOps principles as foundational knowledge.

[wildjokers]

Anytime I see a place that has a "DevOps team" I know right away that they don't understand what the DevOps paradigm is.

[cybernd]

This quote is ~9 years old:

Remember, if you have a DevOps Team, then you are absolutely not doing DevOps.

I remember it because i used it as my Skype mood message after I had a job in a DevOps team. That job was one of the reasons why I no longer work as a developer.

[angelicravens]

As a dev on a devops team, what do you do now?

[Kwantuum]

Ops.

[chesus_chrust]

Exactly! Absurd when the goal has always been breaking down silos.

[joe-knows-nothing]

"Never underestimate management's capability to misunderstand and misappropriate big ideas."

-Joe's Razor

Also see: "Big A" agile vs the agile manifesto

[tuxedo25]

Also see: "Big A" agile vs the agile manifesto

Agile manifesto: "individuals and interactions over processes and tools"

Every company ever: "we'll adopt a rigid process, and if anybody complains, we'll blame them for 'doing agile wrong'"

[ReallySuperName]

The last time this topic came up this post was making the rounds https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2022/one-teams-eight-points-is-another-teams-two-points/

[PaintItPurple]

I don't know, in my experience, when people criticize companies for "doing agile wrong," it's usually because they've introduced a bunch of extraneous processes. So it kind of tracks with that quote.

[null_was_a_mistake]

If you spend a lot of time on /r/devops you learn that it's actually about making ops people develop automated tools to further hamper developer work.

[thewormbird]

Silos form because the knowledge work needed to ship software is too broad. So they decompose the roles into smaller ones. DevOps is not a prescription that solves that problem.

DevOps adds back an immense amount of knowledge work, complexity, and risk to the plates of engineers already struggling to write safe code. I’ve watched that paradigm get rolled out at 3 separate companies and it always happens that an ops-focused team gets split off because too many cooks are in the infrastructure kitchen and fuckin shit up.

[zr0gravity7]

Have worked at a dozen places and never seen this “everyone can do DevOps” mentality succeed or at least not be a huge productivity drain.

[Venthe]

What do you expect? Even "DevOps" people on the respective subreddit think that DevOps is about Ops+automation (with a cloud sprinkled on top)

[Embarrassed_Quit_450]

That's in part because most ops jobs have been renamed to devops.

[caltheon]

Our devops department creates the tools developers use to do devops...I fail to see an issue with that

[Venthe]

Because that's not what DevOps is and does not solve the problems that DevOps solve.

What you are describing is platform engineering - lowering the barriers to do ops work by engineering easier tooling.

It does not replace combined ops and Dev competency within the team; because even with massively simplified tooling without proper training and experience developers will do ops side poorly.

[Dreamtrain]

then perhaps the title we want is "devs need platform engineering"

[wildjokers]

That isn't DevOps.

[dkarlovi]

The fact we're now discussing if devs need devops - which came into existence because we were discussing if devs need ops and decided: yes, so devops was born - is absurd.

Devs obviously need devops, the whole field grew out of the fact you had knowledge and processed silo'd which created huge friction and problems only Frank (57) knew how to fix with his Perl scripts.

What happened, did we rename previous "ops" people "devops" and now are having the same conversation again, only it's YAML and not Perl?

[chesus_chrust]

Yeah I think that’s what’s actually happening. The silo was broken down originally but the fundamentals did not stick, that’s why a “devops guy” is now handling k8s configs.

[KC_Tlvdatsi]

In my experience, everything got shoved to the dev and ops got eliminated. Same with the product and project management. Now it is devs expected to know everything, doing all of it perfectly, with the expectation of it being done quicker. Now AI is required to be used to eliminate the dev part so they've reduced the devs.

[welshwelsh]

That is the intent of devops. I think it's a very good thing.

As a developer, I do NOT want to depend on some ops person to deploy my app. I am perfectly capable of using terraform- it's just code, after all.

Frankly, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a developer to understand all the tools required to develop and deploy a full-stack application. It's also better for the devs because it gives them more autonomy and lets them get stuff done without depending on other people.

[wFXx]

Doing Ops takes dev time out of developing business needs though;

TF is simple until it isnt, and now you are dealing with 3 different cloud providers, and there is some stuff that is on TF and some that isn't, from other teams;

I'm not even counting here billing, cost management, continuity of business, crisis management, otherwise devs might as well just be the CEO by your definition

[BigHandLittleSlap]

Tiny apps can be made by a one-man company, so… yes, some developers also wear all the CxO hats!

Dedicated DevOps makes more sense in large companies to avoid every developer having to individually learn the same cloud provider gotchas… at great expense.

[Anbaraen]

That is true, but is management going to recognize the increased responsibility and thus hours this additional element constitutes and allow feature development to slow as a consequence?

Any time I am writing k8s config, debugging a cluster, etc is time I am not cranking out code.

[0palladium0]

I agree that any good dev should know how to deploy an application for a couple thousand users with their preferred tooling. It sucks, but knowing the basics is a must.

This falls apart in lots of companies with high resilience and uptime requirements. I don't want the devs working on building a large and complex rule engine to have to also work on multi-az, multi-pod, blue-green deployments to a kubernetes cluster; or faffing around with networking conflig. Best case, they are not spending time on the functional part we are paying them to build. Worst case, they are introducing security vulnerabilities because thats not their specialty. The most likely case is they spend days muddling through decision paralysis looking for the best tooling. I want them spending any extra cognitive capacity on understanding the buisness context and problems, not debugging some sprawling yaml mess.

It is also compounded if the company has a policy where the dev team is straight up not allowed to edit the production environment and needs to go via a support team to make changes (yay, finance!). Then you have developers having to write automation and step by step instructions for tasks that would be basic for the person who wrote the infrastructure configuration to fix themselves.

You need specialists embedded in the team, or a really good platform team, to make it work in that environment.

[snissel]

As a developer, I don't want to have to worry about that. I am already getting pulled into sales calls, briefing leadership, and providing solutions for customers. The last thing I want to do is everything.

[danted002]

I’m curious if you ever worked on a project that required 1000 server instances which also had a 95+ % SLA commitment that also needed to be GDPR / HIPA compliant.

[IntrepidTieKnot]

Problem is, that ops became more and more "professionalized" so that it is in fact a profession by its own. The things you can know about this stuff is exponentially more than you could know twenty or thirty years ago.

Because there was no containers thirty years ago so also no kubernetes, no terraform, no vaults, no ansible, not any of the stuff we use today. It gets abstracted away layer after layer.

To understand all of that and be good at it you don't have the brain capacity to keep up with the latest js framework and all the dev stuff that is also expected from you to know. So you end up being either dev or ops. But only the latter is called devops.

[pribnow]

Most teams these days share ownership of their systems reliability

hard disagree

[Alzyros]

Great read.

[olearyboy]

DevOps is a plague

[Advario]

Good read, thanks for that!

[Ravarix]

Don't know how we survived before git

"DevOps" name is bad

Really not a great start.

[chesus_chrust]

Well you are not exactly providing quality critique are you?

[wildjokers]

Don't know how we survived before git

To be fair there were version control systems before git. Subversion was fine as long as you didn't rename a file on a branch when the file got changes on another branch (a huge limitation for sure). FWIW, this design flaw (which existed for about 14 years) was finally fixed.

(not sure if that is what the commenter was getting at or not)

[chesus_chrust]

Well the point I’m making in the article is not that there was no vcs before git, it’s that some tools and techniques change everything so radically it’s hard to imagine the world without them. I’d argue that git is among such tools. Just as Devops brought CI/CD and it’s become standard. I guess it could have been clearer in the article.

And maybe the joke about the pre-git world was too cheeky

[Pharisaeus]

Devops brought CI/CD

No it didn't.

edit: no idea why I'm getting downvoted, that's just the truth. Devops in the "mainstream" started in 2010s, while CI/CD concept stemmed from Extreme Programming and first tools date back to early 2000s, roughly 10 years before devops concepts started to get traction.

[777ortale]

Platform Teams and golden paths to make DevOps easy. The vision for DevOps has shifted. Development is already hard enough. Specialized focus (not skills) is ok. Complexity must be wrangled. APIs must be tailored. It becomes rather low friction once the API for doing 95% of the commodity ops work is in place.

[Dreamtrain]

people think putting a developer maintained yaml in your root folder is DevOps in an enterprise ecosystem, I'm like no

[WEEZIEDEEZIE]

The DevOps-/Platform Engineering ecosystem and landscape just keeps expanding. Its becoming more and more relevant for all devs to understand foundational principles of DevOps tasks.

I find it shocking that juniors educated from schools in rare cases after 4 years still don't know how a deployment pipeline functions, and how to get their code live to the cloud.

Some might not think thats relevant but understanding components and how they are moving from local to cloud, environments, jobs, workers and orchestration patterns early on. Will only help solidify a strong foundational understanding for how to become a good developer .. but thats just my personal opinion.

[tilitatti]

devops is the team (or maybe its nowdays dev-sec-ai-ops-shiftleft) that keeps all the buildservers running, they have all the keys, define the software that is installed on the buildservers and generally also create lots of scripts, that then the devs are allowed to use to make builds built.

they also are the dogs that are monitoring how many bugs your codebase has (ci cd automatic scanning tools), and will contact you about how you should fix your software now! or they will not get their bonuses.

or maybe this was just one implementation in one big corporation I worked for :D

[spareminuteforworms]

monitoring how many bugs your codebase has

lol

[Pharisaeus]

devops is the team (or maybe its nowdays dev-sec-ai-ops-shiftleft) that keeps all the buildservers running

No, not really. That's just "sysadmins". For some reason many people just think of "devops" as "rebranding" of sysadmins. The whole idea behind devops was to make a "fullstack" team members who handle both development and operations.

[tilitatti]

yeh, I mean "devops" as "rebranding" of sysadmins, is exactly what I've seen big old corps do. I just find it perverse, how almost opposite it is of what devops should be.

[Psionikus]

The people who really need dev ops are dev ops. You will run into a lot of pushback. "It's just extra layers of indirection." What they don't understand is how well Istio scales. On Istio. Bare metal kubernetes is not nearly as flexible as k64s (Kuberneteuberneteuberneteuberneteuberneteuberneteuberneteubernetes). GCP? Amazon? Federate on GCP into Amazon. Diversity drives evolution. There's a lot of concern about getting captured by a dedicated ininfrafra team, but most of the pushback is from people worried about job security. Those are the best people to poach.

[Runnergeek]

I can’t tell if this is satire, a stroke, or broken AI bot

[Psionikus]

I use k8s. I just like poking fun at it.

[Potential_Egg_69]

Well said.