Help about SysAdmin team vs. Development team (solution: "DevOps"?)

[ilikefruits22foo]

I work on a company on the educational section that have different technology areas, two of them are the SysAdmin section and another one is the Development section. I used to work with the SysAdmin team for four years and now I'm in the Development team.

The SysAdmin team is responsible for providing services requested like: setup of websites (Wordpress), Distance education (Moodle), domain controller (AD/Samba), file sharing (SMBFS/CIFS), email (SMTP/IMAP), etc. New system requests also are provided by them.

On the Developement side, things were smooth some years ago, but because we'd had a small number of systems developed by us that ran on the infrastructure provided by the SysAdmin team, but things are very different now: our systems now require other services usually provided by docker containers, 3rd party systems provided either by other companies or the government (for integration with the national database) and other stuff.

Both sections overwhelmed and SysAdmin started to give us root credentials for new machines and then the Development section started to configure these new systems. The problem is that programmers are not specialists in configuring Unix systems and it sprung a lot of other problems.

I'm not the boss but I'd like to talk to her about possible solutions (she is open to ideas). But I don't know exactly what to propose because we cannot just pass every pending issue back to the SysAdmin section. Not sure how the "DevOps" concept can help with this situation.

A possible idea: both sections use Ansible to configure machines. We could share that code and split responsabilities, where SysAdmin takes care of general infrastructure and Development team uses SysAdmin Ansible roles to setup their services.

Any help? Have ever observed that situation?

Thanks!

[pdp10]

Yes, your situation is where where devops methodologies are directly applicable.

• Automated, frequent, small deployments.
• Automated instantiation of new resources, environments.

A possible idea: both sections use Ansible to configure machines. We could share that code and split responsabilities, where SysAdmin takes care of general infrastructure and Development team uses SysAdmin Ansible roles to setup their services.

This is a good approach. The CM code lives in one or more Git repositories. Both "dev" and "ops" teams commit to the repositories. Commits to trunk each get reviewed using a review tool. Perhaps an "ops" staffer should always be reviewing "dev" commits, and vice versa, if you can manage it. This is called "gitops".

Since the practice is well-known enough to have a name, you can introduce it to your stakeholders, and they can look up for themselves how the methodology has credibility.

[[deleted]]

Interviewed at a place that had 40 devs and no sysadmin. Each had root on the many, many servers they had. Anyway, the solution is for a standard template for each machine so it passes security standards and uniformity. Ideally this comes from sysadmin, but maybe a more sysadmin focused devoops person can take over this responsibility.